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UICDS™ keeps you better informed so you can make better decisions. UICDS is information sharing middleware for NIMS incident management that continuously receives and shares standardized data among many agencies during an incident. Your everyday application gets from UICDS exactly the data you need to use, visualize, process, improve, decide, and then share back through UICDS to keep everyone informed.
Because UICDS is middleware, there is no new user interface to learn, no cost to obtain it, and you retain complete control over your data. You get notified when an agency has provided new or updated incident data and you share your data with whom you want instantaneously and in the background without any disruption to your operation.
With UICDS you are better informed, your partners are better informed, and together you all make better response decisions.
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Watch
UICDS The Movie
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Get UICDS Free from the Department of Homeland Security
Apply to be a UICDS Pilot and get your own complete UICDS installation, including support, to improve your information sharing. Make your request now. |
Learn All About UICDS Interoperability Middleware in Just Two Minutes
Your time is valuable, so here it is in a nutshell.
UICDS is middleware to share information among applications used by all levels of government and critical infrastructure to manageincidents. UICDS has no end-user interface, so there is no training or new applications to buy.
You should care about UICDS if you manage emergencies or provide technologies to those who manage emergencies.
Click here for a two minute video introduction of UICDS from the UICDS.us website. |
Follow UICDS on LinkedIn
UICDS is now on LinkedIn, the premier business-related social networking site. The site is self-described as the "unofficial UICDS discussion group" among Technology Providers and End-Users. To join the discussion group,  |
| UICDS Contacts
General Information
uicds@dhs.gov
DHS S&T Program Manager Lawrence Skelly Email Now UICDS Project Manager Chip Mahoney Email Now UICDS Outreach Director James W. Morentz, Ph.D. Email Now |
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UICDS™ is a Trademark of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security
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UICDS Update
An Information Sharing Technology Program from the Department of Homeland Security Science and Technology Directorate
In this issue ...
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 UICDS Goes Operational In Michigan With Real-Time, Military-Civilian Resource Tracking Exercise
Earlier this year the UICDS implementation project in Michigan, shared jointly by St. Clair County Homeland Security and Emergency Management Agency and the Mobile Computing Application Platform (MCAP) Project of the US Army, Tank, Automotive Research and Development Engineering Center (TARDEC), was reported on during a UICDS Tutorial and Biweekly Call (recording here).
Now, as Colin Misner of TARDEC reports, the project has gone operational with a major kick-off exercise.
"On Tuesday we successfully shared real-time location tracking of the Michigan National Guard 51st Civil Support  Team as their vehicle convoy made their way from Ft. Custer, Battle Creek, MI. up to Port Huron, MI. Vehicle progress was viewable on both MCAP Tracker and Resilient maps. We were successful again on Wednesday for the actual exercise, this time not only sharing real-time location information, but also map layers. This was the first formal exercise that MCAP has participated in. It not only provided a vast amount of hands on experience and information for our program, but also the possibility of future collaboration with UICDS partners."
Nikki Falk, Homeland Security Planner for St. Clair County was a key operational participant in the project. She reports that "the exercise was good! Sgt. Bunch [Michigan National Guard] was in my office on Tuesday tracking the 51st movement and he seemed pretty happy with it, too!"
You'll be hearing more about this comprehensive exercise and military-civilian UICDS implementation in the coming weeks as both TARDEC and St. Clair HSEM join our UICDS Tutorial and Biweekly Call for a report to us all.
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"I thought it went extremely well. We were sending and updating, and Colin's crew [TARDEC] were sending back, and we could see each other's data, and all the MCAP-equipped resources were moving around on the screens. Here's a quick peek from my side. The MCAP resources are the yellow icons." -- Richard Whisner, Project Manager at IDV Solutions, the contractor with the Department of Homeland Security, Directorate of Science and Technology for the development of the St. Clair "Resilient" application.
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| New Releases of UICDS Technologies Announced
UICDS Version 1.2.2 Released
UICDS V1.2.2 is available for download to those who have signed the Software User Agreement. Changes from V1.2.1 address findings from 508 compliance testing and DHS certification and accreditation efforts. There is no new functionality. If you have downloaded UICDS V1.2.1 and are not utilizing the UICDS 508 capabilities, you do not need to upgrade to V1.2.2.
View the UICDS Version 1.2.1 Introduction Tutorial on the UICDS Collaboration Platform at UICDS.us.
UICDS iPhone and iPad App Update
An updated UICDS App is available from the Apple App Store. This version of the UICDS App allows access to UICDS cores with self-signed certificates as well as CA-signed certificates.
View the UICDS App Tutorial on the UICDS Collaboration Platform at UICDS.us. |
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| A Developer's Guide to UICDS - With Lessons for Operations, Too is Topic of the UICDS Tutorial and Biweekly Call on Thursday at Noon
UICDS gets better - and easier - all the time. With the release of version 1.2.x in August, the ease of installation and the improvement in core-to-core sharing yielded a major benefit to operations center information technology staff. Now, we introduce a set of major benefits for UICDS Technology Provider developers: The expanded UICDS Document Library.
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The UICDS Document Library is filled with new and updated guides to interfacing, using, and maintaining UICDS.
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The UICDS Document Library is your gateway to all the newly revised materials to make developing your interface to UICDS even easier. Based on the lessons we have learned from nearly 100 installations of the UICDS Core and application adapters, the series of UICDS Getting Started Guides has now expanded to include all of the following services:
- Incident Management Service
- Mapping Service
- Alert Service
- Tasking Service
- Incident Action Plan Service
- Resource Management Service
- Sensor Observation Service
- Incident Command Service
Plus, there are new or updated documents to help you with:
- System Installation Plan
- Training on the UICDS Administrative Console
- Maintaining the UICDS Core training
As the accompanying illustration shows, easy access to the documents is provided on the UICDS Collaboration Portal.
The UICDS Quick Start Guides to UICDS Services all provide a comprehensive, step-by-step path to successful integration of applications with UICDS. Each guide describes the XML documents that are created and ready by applications to exchange information using UICDS Work Products, the atomic unit of information sharing.
In addition to the Guide, the Document Library contains for each service a complete XML Document Lifecycle. Service interactions begin with the creation of an incident (or getting the incident that is already created) to which the work product will be associated to build the "UICDS Tree of Incident Knowledge" around an incident. The XML documents do the work product association, create the new work product, update an existing work product, and close and archive work products.
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Ask questions and make comments right in the Document Library to share with your colleagues and the UICDS Team.
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Finally, each document is available for online viewing or download. Online viewing offers the UICDS Collaboration Portal's unique ability to have you interact with the document, making notations and asking questions of the UICDS Team while you are reading. The accompanying illustration shows how you can enter a discussion point or question that will go right to the UICDS Team.
So call into the tutorial and the always interesting "Open Mic" portion of the call where the UICDS participants take over for comments, questions, and updates.
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Join the UICDS Tutorial and Biweekly Call on Thursday at Noon ET
Call: 800-366-7242 code 735108
You can join the online meeting from your PC or mobile device.
Web Collaboration: Click here.
... If requested, enter your name and email address.
... If a password is required, enter the meeting password: uicds2012
... Click "Join."
If you must manually enter the URL into your browser, select the UICDS Biweekly Call and use the password above when you link to:
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| Innovations in Port Security With UICDS Tutorial Now Available on UICDS Collaboration Portal
On our last call we were treated to an overview of PortSec, the Port Security Risk Analysis and Resource Allocation System being developed by the Center of Excellence for Risk and Economic Analysis of Terrorism Events (CREATE) at the University of Southern California. CREATE is supported by the Department of Homeland, Directoate of Security Science and Technology.
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PortSec is a decision-support system used to assess tactical and strategic risks to port operations and reduce risk from terrorist attacks. We learned from Michael D. Orosz, Ph.D., Assistant Director and Lead, Decision Systems Group, Computational Systems and Technology, Information Sciences Institute, Viterbi School of Engineering, that UICDS is an integral part of PortSec enabling researchers and developers to focus on data analysis not the data collection which UICDS does so well.
We heard that UICDS is at the center of aggregation of real-time, transactional data for the modeling and analysis done by PortSec. The PortSec software analyzes facts and figures about a port's layout and operations, anticipated attack vectors and methods, and cost of specific countermeasures. Michale described plans and current operations of PortSec for risk-based analysis of security countermeasures. Subsquently, Elizabeth Lennon of CREATE did a demonstration of PortSec in operation which is included on the UICDS Collaboration Portal with the recording of Michael's presentation.
View the Innovations in Port Security with UICDS Tutorial, including the Demonstration of PortSec (contained in Chapter 5 of the recording) on the UICDS Collaboration Portal now.
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Great Upcoming Tutorials this Fall
Watch this spot for new tutorials planned for the fall ...
Mobile App Field Observations
Moving information from the field - especially from mobile apps - is a new frontier for emergency management. But with the abundance of handheld devices today, and the advent of social media taking pictures and making postings throughout an incident, UICDS is leading the way on this new form of information sharing. This tutorial focuses on field observations and the use of the Sensor Observation Service (SOS). In short, "human sensors" provide an extraordinary view of an incident. Whether formally involved in data collection using a field investigation tool or informally involved in crowd-sourced data submitted by individuals, the UICDS SOS is the ideal place to store observations and associate them with incidents. This tutorial will describe Best Practices for using the SOS format for all the updates provided by the "human sensors" in the field.
Getting the UICDS Accreditation for Operation on Highly Security Networks
UICDS recently received the Authority To Operate (ATO) on one of the Department of Homeland Security secure networks. This Certification and Accreditation (C&A) process delved deep into the inner workings and code of UICDS and into the implementation policies and procedures. UICDS passed with flying colors, in part because development follows the Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) Level 3. The CMMI is a process improvement maturity model for the development of products and services created by Carnegie Mellon University for the Department of Defense certification for which is now managed by the Software Engineering Institute. It consists of best practices that address development and maintenance activities that cover the product lifecycle. Join us to learn more about the C&A process and how UICDS achieved this important accomplishment.
UICDS Self-Demo
This tutorial will provide you with all the information you need to see what UICDS can do. This is live data being consumed by a UICDS Core from several different applications. You will be able to actually use a number of applications to see the data and interact with it. Thanks to the wonderful participation of some of the UICDS Technology Providers, you will be able to use live versions of their software to see UICDS data. These include a video aggregation application, mobile apps, a utility outage response application, plus commonly available geospatial visualization tools like Google Earth. So join us for this tutorial and walk away with the ability to use UICDS at your desk or on your phone.
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| UICDS Mobile App Example Code Available for Android® and Apple®
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Become a UICDS Pilot - Yours from DHS
Tired of watching and want to get involved? Are you a government agency that knows you should share information better? Critical infrastructure owner/operator in need of coordination with governments? Technology provider who wants to better serve emergency management and response organizations?
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Use the UICDS Development Kit To Win Contracts that Require UICDS Compliance
Recently, the State of California and the State of West Virginia both issued requests for proposals that called for UICDS compliance as a condition of the contract. Feeling left behind?
Now there is a guide to what it means to "comply" with UICDS. Get the new UICDS Compliance Overview report to see the details. And you can see and listen to the UICDS Compliance Tutorial about compliance with UICDS v 1.1.1 on the UICDS Collaboration Portal. If this is you ... and you don't want to be excluded from future bids ... just answer a few questions to get the UICDS Development Kit and example code to build your UICDS Adapter today. Get started by clicking here.
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