 Military - Civilian Collaboration Through UICDS: Forming the Dot Mil UICDS User Group Tutorial Now Available on UICDS Collaboration Portal
Our most recent UICDS Tutorial and Biweekly Call was a discussion of the use and role of UICDS in supporting and enabling information sharing between military and civilian emergency response organizations and among emergency responders. It was clear that information sharing is critical to the successful support of the operation by military equipment and personnel. As a result, UICDS has been the middleware selected by several military organizations and has been the subject of investigation by many others.
The announced purpose of the call was to share among the participants their experiences with UICDS - some having developed with UICDS, others just thinking about a plan, and starting by kicking the tires. Among some of the comments made on the call were:
Don Palmer, IT Program Manager in the National Guard Bureau (J6) described the key needs for shared situational awareness. Within the National Guard, JIEE is the primary common operational picture; however, it is generally unavailable to civilian organizations. Thus, NGB has a project plan to use UICDS to share among State National Guards and the 17 NGB sharing partners.
Dan Huber, the Common Operational Picture Manager for the Air National Guard Emergency Management, described the ANG approach to working with JIEE as the internal COP for daily business and using UICDS to share with off-base partners who are using commercial applications. View the earlier ANG presentation to a UICDS Tutorial.
Robert Zawarski of Environmental Technology Integrators, the prime contractor for the State of South Carolina Palmetto Vision Project, described how 31 counties are being united in information sharing through UICDS along with the South Carolina National Guard. Through UICDS, the NORTHCOM SAGE program is joined to JIEE and, evolving, the junction of that critical military information with counties through UICDS.
Nicholas Caruso, the Mobile Computing Application Platform (MCAP) Project Lead for the US Army Tank, Automotive Research and Development Engineering Center (TARDEC) described how MCAP is the "underpinning" of common military-civilian situational awareness and UICDS is the middleware that makes it possible for numerous technology providers to write programming interfaces to share information. He provided an update (view his earlier UICDS Tutorial presentation) on the implementation of links through UICDS to St. Clair County, Michigan's Resilient application to provide tactical unit level, commander, and dismounted soldier information sharing.
Ekta Patel, US Army Armament Research, Development and Engineering Center (ARDEC), is the UICDS project leader and lead for the UICDS DIACAP Certification process. She provided an update on the status of the effort as well as discussed previous projects in which ARDEC employed UICDS to link military programs such as Command Post of the Future and WebPuff with commercial products WebEOC, IRRIS, ETeam, and Google Earth (view the military-civilian demonstration video).
Richard Powell of the Joint Executive Program Office for Chemical Biological Defense described a project he felt was compatible with UICDS and offered to pilot with DHS on radiological data sharing. His project has developed a data model with more than 7,000 XML definitions available for reuse while designing schemas for data sharing through UICDS.
David Coggeshall of the Golden Gate Safety Network built on this discussion to describe a project that he also felt would contribute to UICDS. He is engaged in the categorization of facility types for the purpose of preregistering critical infrastructure.
Dr. Rick Richards, Global Emergency Resources, described his efforts to interface military and civilian organizations during disaster drills. He is looking for UICDS to be able to move information across those boundaries.
Robert Brundage from Ft. Campbell, Kentucky, described his role in geospatial information management and suggested that UICDS could be able, through its use of Open Geospatial Consortium standards, to support their enterprise GIS in exchanging information among IOCs and EOCs.
The final discussion of the afternoon was prompted by John Black of the Hillsborough, Oregon Sheriff Department. He recounted from his military experience the need for civilian information sharing. That has been reinforced by his current activities in law enforcement. He sees UICDS as an obvious pathway to improve that critical information sharing.
Black's further comments focused on the view that the profession needs to move from situational awareness to decision making. He views the gap between what we know and how we decide as critical. Dan Huber responded that there is a big difference between what you see and know and what you need to know. Both pondered how UICDS could help.
Jim Morentz of the UICDS Team then suggested that the enormous contribution UICDS makes by managing content can help address this need. Recognizing that the general and the sheriff have very different information needs, UICDS focuses on Common Operational Data that allows applications to compose different thresholds of information sharing. The General needs high level information, one might say strategic information. The sheriff needs tactical information about the location of trucks delivering support resources. Both need alerts, but again at a different threshold.
UICDS' ability to manage content around an incident allows for different thresholds and different sets of information to be composed out of Common Operational Data for different target end-users. This is an entirely new way of thinking about situational awareness. It is focused and, Morentz said, may lead to a new generation of applications that consume and analyze data from the many sources UICDS offers rather than trying to be the single source of data for an end-user.
The community on the phone agreed that the military-civilian dialogue is of critical importance and that the Dot Mil UICDS User Group should continue its formation. It was agreed that Dot Mil calls will take place bimonthly until more frequent calls are requested by the group. Because of the large number of participants, we will also explore whether the call becomes an additional call or continues to be combined with the regular UICDS Tutorial and Biweekly call.
Either way, anyone will be welcome on the Dot Mil calls, but their focus will be on military implementation of UICDS and military-civilian collaboration through UICDS.
Watch this space for future developments.
View the Dot Mil Users Group UICDS Tutorial on the UICDS Collaboration Platform at UICDS.us.
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