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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 Implement UICDS and get your own complete UICDS installation, including support, to improve your information sharing. Make your request now.
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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 Implementation In Michigan Exercises Real-Time National Guard Response to County Emergency is Featured on UICDS Tutorial and Biweekly Call on Thursday at Noon
A simulated emergency occurred in St. Clair County where it was entered into the "Resilient" incident management software which was developed by IDV Solutions for the Department of Homeland Security, Directorate of Science and Technology for St. Clair County, Michigan, Homeland Security and Emergency Management Agency. Resilient is connected to UICDS on a continual basis for daily operations and emergencies. The emergency was simulated to be of a type and scope that the rules in UICDS shared the incident to the Michigan National Guard represented by the US Army, Tank, Automotive Research and Development Engineering Center (TARDEC) UICDS Core via core-to-core sharing. The Michigan NG UICDS spawned notification of the Michigan 51st Civil Support Team at Ft. Custer which was deployed and tracked in both its home tracking application and the St. Clair application.
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MCAP Tracker showing location of CST movement responding to Port Huron simulated event.
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"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," reported Colin Misner of the Mobile Computing Application Platform (MCAP) Project at TARDEC describing the joint exercise with St. Clair County, Michigan.
"Vehicle progress was viewable on both MCAP Tracker and
Resilient maps," Colin reported on the initial tests. "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." Colin will be presenting and demonstrating the TARDEC portion of the UICDS implementation and will be joined by Ashish Jain of Applied Communication Sciences.
 Nikki Falk, Homeland Security Planner for St. Clair County was a key operational participant in the project and will be joining for the presentation and demonstration on Thursday with Jeff Friedland, St Clair County Homeland Security and Emergency Management Director. Nikki 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!"
During the simulated emergency response, all CST units were tracked throughout the day so that the St. Clair EOC could better manage the responding personnel, integrating their efforts with those of local responders. Coordination between the St. Clair EOC and other county and state transportation agencies assures the CST vehicles an unimpeded trip to St. Clair, speeding the arrival of aid and disrupting the traffic and commerce along the route to a minimum.
The several units of the CST were deployed and tracked by GPS on the vehicles. Their location is transmitted to the TARDEC MCAP software suite. The MCAP Tracker application shares location information to its UICDS Core which is shared, by agreement, to the St. Clair UICDS Core. The Resilient application then displays the location of the CST vehicles updated at 10 second intervals. At the same time, the National Guard is seeing their CST vehicles movement on MCAP Tracker.
The combination of MCAP and Resilient, sharing information through UICDS, produced an effective military-civilian collaboration environment that, in a real emergency, is sure to maximize the deployment of joint resources to improve response to saving lives and protecting property.
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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 for the development of the St. Clair "Resilient" application.
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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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| A Quick Look at the California Earthquake Clearinghouse Shakeout 2012 Technology Exercise
The California Earthquake Clearinghouse conducted the second of its planned six exercises employing UICDS as it information sharing middleware (details). More exercise reports will be coming your way in the weeks ahead, but here is a quick look at some of the information sharing through UICDS that took place last week.
Seismic Network Locates Earthquake and Shares Through UICDS
Initial earthquakes comes from the California Integrated  Seismic Network, jointly operated by the U.S. Geological Survey, California Geological Survey, Cal Tech and University of California, Berkeley. Shared through UICDS, non-scientists can see the epicenter and fault on any application, here using Google Maps.
Caltrans Traffic Sensors from FiRST Testbed Shared Through UICDS
One of the early indicators of the extent of the earthquake  are traffic sensors that show stoppages. At the University of California, Santa Barbara, the California Department of Transportation is a supporter of the First Responder's System & Technologies (FiRST) Testbed which uses UICDS to monitor and distribute Caltrans traffic sensor data. In Shakeout, FiRST simulated traffic flows affected by the earthquake.
Mobile Apps Allow Field Reports to Flow to EOCs  Through UICDS
This mobile app, SpotOnResponse, allows the professional team of public and private responders to be alerted to nearby incidents (red) and to provide field reports immediately, all of which are shared through UICDS to EOCs and critical lifeline infrastructure.
Field Reports Flow Through UICDS to All Connected Applications 
Here we see two field reports from SpotOnResponse (Damaged Rails and Building Evacuated) provided through UICDS to Google Earth or any other connected application with interest in field reports and permission to view them.
USGS Field Notes Gives Geologists and Earth Scientists Reporting App 
This mobile app by the U.S. Geological Survey allows earth scientists and geologists to record observations about earthquake fault ruptures, liquefaction, and landslides. In the hands of experts, the scientific calculations are dynamically entered and available on UICDS.
Scientific Observations Made More Efficient Through UICDS Sharing 
As earth scientists and geologists spread out following an earthquake using the USGS Field Notes mobile app, they report their observations and measurements to USGS. As they do, those reports are shared through UICDS to connected applications. This allows other scientists, as well as emergency responders and critical infrastructure repair crews, to see the extent of damage and scientists to avoid wasted time in assessing previously reported areas.
NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory Shares Satellite Imagery Analysis 
NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, implemented a tool to use the analysis provided by the ARIA satellite, called Radar Deconfliction. Radar Deconfliction is represented by the red locations that means between two radar satellite images there is a difference - which might mean a change in the landscape, for example, a loss of elevation that might mean a building collapse.
Image Analysis Yields an Incident in UICDS to be Checked for Impact 
In Shakeout the California Geological Survey performed image analysis on the NASA Radar Deconfliction. Putting the human in the loop lets someone distinguish between uninhabited areas from possible infrastructure losses. The NASA APL tool identifies the location and allows entry of a note, "subsidence in parking lot," that points scientists and engineers to the location to investigate. That information is transmitted through UICDS to local mobile devices of engineers who are part of the response team who are then able to investigate.
Satellite Image Analysis Enables Response Request Sharing 
When mobile devices received the NASA satellite imagery analysis results from the California Geological Survey through UICDS during Shakeout, scientists and engineers had to decide how to respond. Using this location-based app, the location of the end-user allowed the app to determine their proximity to potential damage areas and, thus, point them to the nearest inspection site. In Shakeout, the SpotOnResponse mobile app was a "gateway" for scientists and engineers to deeper investigation through the USGS Field Notes.
Earthquake Modeling from NASA JPL Helps Quickly Identify Vulnerable Infrastructure 
The E-DECIDER program at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory incorporates a host of models that forecast the intensity of an earthquake. In this view, the results of a model have been shared through UICDS to identify the epicenter and a 40 mile radius of potential damage. Within that area, E-DECIDER then queries the HAZUS data set, a national database of infrastructure, to identify what potentially vulnerable facilities exist - bridges, hazmat facilities, schools, healthcare facilities, and many more. These appear as icons on the map and can become the basis for further investigations and assessments, all of which are reported back through UICDS to other connected applications.
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| A Developer's Guide to UICDS Tutorial Now Available on UICDS.us Collaboration Portal
If you haven't seen UICDS lately, you haven't UICDS at all!
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.
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 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.
Quick Start Guides and other training materials now have been updated for 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
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Ask questions and make comments right in the Document Library to share with your colleagues and the UICDS
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The UICDS Collaboration Portal's unique ability to have you interact with the document makes notations and asking questions of the UICDS Team possible while you are reading. Every document allows a blog-like discussion where you ask questions and the UICDS Team responds. Plus, you get the benefit of all the other questions anyone has asked to help speed your way to understanding. The complete tutorial and the always interesting "Open Mic" portion of the call are now available on the UICDS Collaboration Portal and by clicking here. |
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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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| 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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Implement UICDS - Yours Free 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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