UICDS Mobile Apps were a popular outcome of our development efforts in 2011.  The Android app is available as described below and the Apple app is available on the Apple App Store (see next article).

But best of all, just as we have provided lots of example code for web application developers to download and make their own, we also have example code for both Android phones and Apple iPad and iPhone.  

Download of the example code requires access credentials that were provided for those who have received the UICDS Core Development Kit.  If you do not have credentials, you can request access by linking to either Request the UICDS Development Kit or Apply to be a UICDS Pilot, depending on your circumstance. 

Among the features included in the first release of UICDS Mobile Apps for Android and Apple iOS are:

• Display list of Incidents
• Display list of Alerts
• Display text description (contained in a UICDS Work Product) of any Incident or Alert
• Display all Incidents or Alerts on a map
• Highlight an Incident or Alert shown on the map and see brief summary information in a pop-up box
• Display selected Incidents or Alerts on a map
• Display polygon graphics associated with a CAP Alert on the map
• Display Open Geospatial Consortium standard Web Mapping Service map overlays associated with an Incident on the map 

At the Second Annual National Capital Region Interoperability Conference conducted by the All Hazards Consortium (AHC), we showed examples of numerous technologies sharing through UICDS all across the region. In the NCR, several individual pilots are taking place.  This demonstration showed how those pilots could be joined together through UICDS sharing agreements into a complete, region-wide sharing network.

The technologies shown were, sometimes, the actual

Demonstrating technology equivalents to operational systems using actual, but not current, data shared through UICDS

applications used in jurisdictions across the region.  In other cases, because of restricted access to the operational technologies, we showed the technical equivalent of the operational system. 

The video shows, in just five minutes, how effectively a net of information sharing can be created through UICDS.

So, take a look at this quick video to see data shared from: 

• Three different Computer-Aided Dispatch
• Four different incident management applications
• Three different GIS viewers
• IPAWS national warning system from FEMA
• ALOHA chemical dispersion model from EPA
• Traffic cameras  

View the video on the UICDS Collaboration Portal.

In 2011, new video was released by the Armament Research Development and Engineering Center (ARDEC) at Picatinny Arsenal in New Jersey showing the UICDS middleware as their key component to enable information sharing among homeland security technologies developed by both commercial organizations from civilian use and military applications.   

• Eteam™ from NC4
• IRRIS™ from GeoDecisions
• WebEOC™ from ESI911
• ESA Portal™ from NC4
• ESRI COP™ from Environmental Systems Research Institute
• Google Earth™ from Google
• CPOF, Command Post of the Future from the Army Battle Command Systems
• FBCB2, Force XXI Battle Comand Brigade and Below from the Army Battle Command Systems
• WebPuff from the Chemical Stockpile Emergency Preparedness Program
• JSIF, Joint Situational Awareness Interoperability Framework from ARDEC 
• RDDB, Resource Directory Database from the State of New Jersey
• iTeam, Information Technology for Emergency Management from Rutgers University Center for Information Management, Integration, and Connectivity  

The demonstration displayed the effectiveness of using UICDS by allowing disparate emergency management applications to interoperate for: 

• Multi-agency Common Operating Picture (COP)
• Resource Messaging
• Chemical Release
• Event Correlation

The demonstration video is now on the UICDS Collaboration Platform and may be reached by following this link: 

What does it means to "conform" with UICDS?  In 2011, we conducted a tutorial for a manager who wants to tell his or her technical people what to do with UICDS. 

While there is no formal compliance testing program for UICDS yet, this tutorial and the accompanying documentation can be used by a potential purchaser of incident management technology to specify what UICDS compliance means to their specific Request for Proposal.  

The tutorial and documentation also can be used by Technology Providers to plan their integration efforts to achieve maximum match between their applications and the many forms of UICDS information sharing. 

The tutorial covers:

• Required and Optional Web Services
• Data Elements in Work Products, Required and Optional
• Standards Employed in UICDS Data Exchanges

UICDS The Movie is a short summary of UICDS featuring more than a dozen different applications that serve the needs of the emergency management community sharing information.  

UICDS Tree of Incident Knowledge

This presentation of UICDS consists of a two-minute introduction to UICDS from the perspective of content - what information moves through UICDS and how it combines to provide what is needed to make collaborative decisions in an incident command or emergency operations center.

Then, more than a dozen different technologies are quickly described in their interactions with UICDS.  You will see how UICDS delivers two-way, one-to-many collaboration among incident management applications beginning with dispatch, moving through resources, including geospatial data including effects of a chemical plume, and concluding with a common operating picture.  All the different ways individual agencies look at information today - but with UICDS all those agencies are sharing standardized data so everyone has the current view of what is needed to resolve the problem.  

• If you are an emergency management operator, this is your chance to see the UICDS Tree of Incident Knowledge grow before your eyes. 

One of our most popular UICDS Tutorials and Biweekly Calls of 2011 focused on the UICDS NLE 11 Technology Showcase.  Attendees heard about the participation of many applications (and you can hear about them still on the UICDS Collaboration Portal): 

Richard Wells of the Las Vegas Office of Emergency Management was one of many people who took advantage of our offer to observe the UICDS NLE 11 Technology Showcase through either Google Earth or the ESRI Flex Viewer.  Below are excerpts from Richard's note to Joel Myhre who worked with the Direct Relief International UICDS Pilot in the Technology Showcase and Jim Morentz, UICDS Outreach Director:

"Hey Joel and Jim.  Although I was not able to participate in the NLE 11 exercise I was able to login to the UICDS Flex Viewer and look around a bit.  First off my thanks to both of you for affording the access to the flex viewer for the exercise - it gave me plenty of ideas and examples to illustrate to my Emergency Manager here at the city. 

"Performance was the first thing that caught my attention - I found the drawing speeds and address lookup to be excellent...

"I was also both impressed and amazed at the presentation of the information from the UICDS incidents and alerts buttons.  The Flex Viewer is the perfect presentation tool to use spatial content to illustrate what is going on and where.  The call out boxes were very easy to read and to work around while zooming, panning etc. The content with embedded links and other key incident information was also very impressive.

"Having been challenged for years here at the local level to develop and implement a workflow with an end result like this has me very interested in the nuts and bolts that made all this come together.  I have seen some good implementations of commercial incident management software in operation but nothing even close to this! 

"Thanks to you Joel I have been able to tap into a few briefs on UICDS but still am very thin on the process and workflow etc.  I am very much interested in learning more about it as far as how the information from the field, EOC and other locations were able to get synced up and presented in such an impressive format.

UICDS was one of a select few technologies participating in NLE11 that presented case studies at the National Exercise Lessons Learned Conference in September.

One case study focused on an Overview of NLE 11 and UICDS participation with a number of different Technology Providers and several of the ongoing UICDS Pilots.

UICDS in the Cloud was the subject of the second case study, recounting the installation of UICDS in the Cloud and its operations throughout the exercise to demonstrate the scalability of UICDS to a national catastrophic event.

A detailed case history of the use of Modeling Results Shared Through UICDS constituted the third case study showing linkages to chemical air dispersion models, water contamination models, and their distribution to a number of technologies providing situational awareness. 

See the UICDS Tree of Incident Knowledge grow before your eyes.

The purpose of this mid-2011 tutorial was to illustrate some of our current UICDS Tools and example code.  You saw how an incident created without a location, say from an RSS feed or an application, can be shared with a GIS application which adds its own special information to the incident.  In this case, adds a location. 

Then, when another application looks at the incident, it sees not just the incident but the incident and location. 

Not only is information shared, it is improved by the composite of all applications, each sharing their specific data to form incident knowledge.

So see how the Tree of Incident Knowledge grows and how UICDS delivers two-way, one-to-many collaboration among incident management applications. 

 View the UICDS Incident and Map Sharing Tutorial.

During a biweekly call and tutorial in early 2011 we introduced three tools that help to add information to the UICDS Tree of Incident Knowledge.  UICDS Tools are part of a "starter kit" of application example code that all UICDS Technology Providers can access to speed their way to full UICDS conformance.  The audio and video demonstration and discussion of the tools is available on the UICDS Collaboration Platform under UICDS Tools Binary, Link, Shapefile Tutorial.  Three tools introduced in this tutorial are:    

• Link and Binary Work Products Submitter used to associate links and binary files to an incident. 

• Shapefile Submitter used to associate ESRI Shapefiles to an incident. 

• Link/Binary/Shapefile (LBS) Viewer which reaches into the UICDS Core, identifies all the incidents that have link, binary, or Shapefiles associated with them, and then enables the viewing of those files through the appropriate program.

The UICDS Tutorial in February 2011 showed an application and example code for UICDS output via RSS (Really Simple Syndication) to provide a "feed" of data that can be subscribed to by an application.  This allows point-to-point, application-to-application one-way delivery of data.   

We also showed the common variant of the RSS feed, GeoRSS, which enables the channel to carry content that includes geographic locations, plus some related feature descriptions, that receiving applications can use to display on maps.   

The UICDS Tool, RSS Injector, is designed to show adapter developers how to create adapters to ingest RSS and GeoRSS feeds.  The reason for doing this in UICDS is to (a) create a one-to-many relationship for important feeds so that they are shared among UICDS applications without each application having to separately consume the feed and (b) to allow applications to select feeds to associate with an incident and select items from a feed to associate with an incident. 

This UICDS Tool is intended to illustrate the capabilities of UICDS to ingest RSS and GeoRSS feeds; however, the most important role of the tool is to provide example code for developers to employ in their own applications and adapters. 

View the demonstration and tutorial on the RSS Injector UICDS Tool  on the UICDS Collaboration Portal. 

Aaron Lieb, U.S. Army Armament Research, Development and Engineering Center (ARDEC), one of the long-time participants in UICDS posed this question to the UICDS community:  Where do we get a resource typing schema?

So we turned over one of the UICDS Tutorials and Biweekly Calls to Aaron who discussed why the development community is in need of a resource typing schema.  And how to get it.

This is not the NIMS Resource Typing that is an on-going effort supported by DHS.  That represents the content of resource names and types.  Rather, Aaron talked about the need for a schema into which this content is placed in a computer format.  

OASIS® and EDXL Examples

The examples coming from OASIS for using the Emergency Data Exchange Language-Resource Messaging (EDXL-RM) TypeStructure and TypeInformation element have largely had place holder information such as the type structure: urn:x-hazard:vocab:resourceTypes - which seems to be something used for the purpose of an example. The documentation from OASIS explains that the community of interest that wishes to share Resource information needs to come up with an agreed upon schema, which application interfaces on all sides of an information sharing exchange will be able to understand like an IPAWS COG, UICDS Core, or other message routers, etc.

Getting to This Point

In researching the schema, Aaron discovered an example of a resource typing schema that was developed as part of the FEMA IRIS resource system.  From the IRIS User's Guide (see documentation below), Aaron derived a resource typing schema that he is offering as a starting point for discussion. Aaron's version is linked below.  

The specification seems to capture the type of information that would be relevant for implementing NIMS typing through UICDS - making this structure a very strong candidate for standardizing how type information should be defined when constructing EDXL-RM messages (see linked document below).   

Future Requirements

Aaron suggests that the UICDS community is one place that can participate in the ongoing discussion regarding resource typing schemas.  Ultimately there will be an official stamp of approval through NIEM, OASIS, FEMA, or others, but until then, the UICDS community can contribute to the discussion.  (See the next article for the discussion that emerged from our first resource typing schema tutorial.)

To read up on some of the issues about resource typing and to see the draft schema Aaron offered up for discussion, you may download the following documents: 

• User's Guide for IRIS, the FEMA resource management application.
• IRIS derived Resource Schema 
• Proposed Resource Schema created by Aaron as a baseline for discussion
• EDXL-RM incorporation of the Proposed Resource Schema

View the Resource Typing and Schema Tutorial

UICDS was part of a 2011 demonstration of Cell-All, a Department of Homeland Security, Science and Technology Directorate (S&T) effort to equip cell phones with a sensor capable of detecting deadly chemicals at minimal cost.  Combining the efforts of several companies and government agencies, the Cell-All project will embed sensor in cell phones in order to detect a problem and alert authorities automatically.  

Detection, identification, and notification all take place in less than 60 seconds. Because the data are delivered digitally, Cell-All reduces the chance of human error. And by activating alerts from many people at once, Cell-All cleverly avoids the longstanding problem of false positives. 

The role that UICDS played in the demonstration was to disseminate the alert information to incident management software that operations in emergency operations centers.  In the demonstration, UICDS delivered notification of the Cell-All alert (originally a Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) message) to NC4's ETeam™ application software.

The end result: emergency responders can get to the scene sooner and cover a larger area-essentially anywhere people are-casting a wider net than stationary sensors can.

In addition to NC4, three teams from Qualcomm, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), and Synkera Technology worked together on the demonstration.  

"SIMON and UICDS platforms are believed to represent a comprehensive collection of standards relevant to information gathering and sharing, as well as to interoperability."  

Shane Mason and the team from SRI International (SRI) reported on their study of standards that included a look at UICDS.  In the study, Shane reported, "We first present background information on the use and types of standards. Then, we describe both SIMON (Smart Integration Manager Ontologically Networked) and UICDS to create a basis of understanding for the use of standards in the development and design cycle of the two platforms."

The study was conducted as part of SRI's work on the Maritime Security Technology Pilot (MSTP) for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Science and Technology (S&T) Directorate.  SRI analyzed the standards relationship between SIMON and UICDS.  The study focused on 14 architectural standards, two schema types, and two transport protocols and their utility for emergency management information sharing.    

In describing each platform, Shane said they "describe components, such as services, in detail to provide information about the use and incorporation of particular standards. We then present a use case describing potential integration between specific system instantiations of each platform as a basis for assessing the risk of such integration." 

View the Standards Assessment Tutorial