If there were a single best way to manage emergencies, maybe (and only maybe) could we design a single best way to management emergency information.  But that is not going to happen.  There is no single or easy solution to achieving the goal of emergency information sharing (EIS) because there is no single way to manage an incident.

In 2012 on the UICDS Tutorial and Biweekly Call, we explored several dimensions of this information sharing issue.  

The first lesson we learned was that the goal of all emergency information sharing is Common Operational Data (COD). 

The second lesson was that to cut through the hype about information sharing we must base our comparisons and discussion on a well-known conceptual framework for information sharing.

Our third lesson was that there have been investments made in other information sharing efforts which have succeeded in achieving their narrow mission focus but not provided the comprehensive solution needed.  Instead of being viewed as an important part, they were seen (usually by outsiders, not designers) as the single solution to emergency information sharing.

Lesson 1: Common Operational Data 

The Holy Grail of emergency information management is a common operational picture (COP).  The problem with this goal is that each organization has a specific mission that is, by definition, unique to its role in an emergency.  Thus, a COP that truly is useful to an organization will be specific - and thus, more than likely, an "uncommon operating picture." 

Diane Vaughan, the GIS Manager for the California Emergency Management Agency was the first to recognize the unique role of UICDS when she finished her first extended discussion on UICDS and summed up the essence of UICDS when she called it "Common Operational Data."

What Diane immediately recognized was that when standardized data is shared among multiple applications, then a COP visualization can be easily and inexpensively derived to support any organizational mission.  Since then, in multiple discussions, we have defined Common Operational Data (COD) as that set of essential information needed by each participant in an emergency to make the right decisions. COD empowers applications to compose views for their end-users that ideally suit their decisions with the knowledge that all the different views of different end-users are sharing exactly the same data.  

You can review the UICDS is Common Operational Data (COD) Tutorial on the UICDS Collaboration Portal.

Lesson 2: Information Sharing Framework

In past weeks we have seen that there is a commonly accepted conceptual framework that helps to guide the design of information sharing for emergency management.  This was introduced as a Conceptual Interoperability Framework by John Contestabile of the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory that includes three "layers" of interoperability - data, integration, and presentation.    

As shown in the figure, data comes from many different sources.  One could try to achieve sharing at the data level, but it would require a multitude of interfaces among proprietary, legacy, and firewalled systems.  A more achievable approach is to enable data to "publish" to the integration layer once.  Many types of presentation tools could then touch the copy of the data held at the integration layer and visualize the data in special ways for the end-user. 

You can view John Contestabile's Conceptual Information Sharing Framework Tutorial on the UICDS Collaboration Portal.

Lesson 3:  Information Sharing Limitations

Most information sharing designs result in the aggregation of one type of information rather then the integration of all types of information.  Aggregation is extremely effective and valuable for the end-users of the aggregated data. However, aggregators can be guilty of creating a silo of aggregated information that is inaccessible to sharing among other end-users.  This still leaves the end-user going to one screen for maps, another for alerts, another for sensors, etc.

Morever, aggregation is one way. True information sharing requires two-way exchange of information in order to deliver to all applications in the presentation layer the appropriate Common Operational Data. How do we get from parallel aggregations to two-way emergency information sharing with COD?

According to Contestabile, "Interoperability is achieved at the 'integration layer' by connecting the various tools at that layer to one another.  This would result in only a few interfaces between a handful of key integration tools."   

The Continuing Lesson:  Integrating at the Integration Layer

One information sharing architecture has taken on this challenge.  It is the Department of Homeland Security, Directorate of Science and Technology, Unified Incident Command and Decision Support (UICDS™) middleware. UICDS alone is not the sole answer but used in combination with other "pieces of the EIS puzzle" effective, two-way, standards-based EIS can be enabled for local, state, and federal governments and private sector critical infrastructure.

The UICDS Tutorial and Biweekly call on Emergency Information Sharing Alternatives Come Together at the Integration Layer Through UICDS will examine how UICDS works with other information sharing designs to maximize the investment made in those efforts while creating comprehensive emergency information sharing that provides two-way collaboration, incident-centric content management, and robust adaptation to multiple concepts of operations.  

In the tutorial, we recognize that UICDS alone is not the sole answer but used in combination with other "pieces of the EIS puzzle" effective, two-way, standards-based EIS can be enabled for local, state, and federal governments and private sector critical infrastructure.  This topic is further examined in a white paper titled Using the Right Sharing Tools to Create EIS Will Produce Common Operational Data. 

The tutorial discussed how UICDS works with other information sharing designs to maximize the investment made in those efforts while creating comprehensive emergency information sharing that provides two-way collaboration, incident-centric content management, and robust adaptation to multiple concepts of operations.   

View the UICDS Integrating at the Integration Layer Tutorial on the UICDS Collaboration Platform.

California Earthquake Clearinghouse Shakeout 2012 Technology Exercise 

View the entire Shakeout Exercise UICDS Tutorial on the UICDS Collaboration Portal. 

The operation of our Nation's ports depends on carefully balancing competing needs: maintaining the security of these bustling economic and transportation hubs, ensuring the continued flow of goods, and ensuring that the multitude of agencies and components (police, harbor patrol, owners, businesses, etc.) involved in port security and operations can perform their daily activities.     The Department of Homeland Security Science and Technology Center of Excellence for Risk and Economic Analysis of Terrorism Events (CREATE) is developing the Port Security Risk Analysis and Resource Allocation System (PortSec), a decision-support system used to assess tactical and strategic risks to port operations and reduce risk from terrorist attacks.  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.  UICDS serves as the middleware for various information sources and port incidents, allowing the CREATE researchers to focus on the modeling and analysis of risk. As shown in the diagram, UICDS is at the center of aggregation of real-time, transactional data for the modeling and analysis done by PortSec. PortSec helps port security officers and analysts perform risk assessments and resource allocation in order to optimally balance security activities and countermeasures, business continuity, and daily port activities.  The PortSec software analyzes facts and figures about a port's layout and operations, anticipated attack vectors and methods, and cost of specific countermeasures. PortSec takes into account vulnerabilities, threats and potential resource allocations, and assesses them against consequences and costs.   Leading the program is Michael D. Orosz, Ph.D., Assistant Director and Lead, Decision Systems Group, Computational Systems and Technology, Information Sciences Institute, Viterbi School of Engineering, at the University of Southern California.  On a UICDS Tutorial he described plans and performance of PortSec for risk-based analysis of security countermeasures to reconcile the seemingly opposing goals of minimizing the risk of terrorism while maintaining unimpeded flow of daily port activity.     The PortSec display shows the port map, resources available, and risk assessments and locations. The challenge in undertaking these risk assessments and resource allocation analyses is that transport nodal points such as seaports are complex, composed of many components with varying degrees of dynamic interaction.    Dynamically changing inputs from local data sources need to be factored into developing the current risk status, the results of which then must be provided to the port security managers and jurisdictional responders responsible for managing the risk in a cost-effective manner and appropriate action initiated.   CREATE has designed around UICDS as the transporter of this dynamic input data as well as the publisher of analytical results.  Eventually, PortSec will incorporate the experience of other UICDS implementations that have shared information from sensors, incident logs, personnel management, dispatch systems, video surveillance, common operating picture, and mobile applications.  The demonstration provided in the UICDS Tutorial and Biweekly Call recording (see below) showed how PortSec and UICDS will:  Receive data from sources such as ship arrival information from Los Angeles Marine Exchange, local transportation conditions from Caltrans and other local networks, up-to-date intelligence information from sources such as iSARs or the JRIC, etc. Establish an incident event in UICDS that is then used to assess risk status to the ports' critical infrastructures, ships, terminals, etc. Share allocation decisions as well as current operating picture (COP) - vessel locations, traffic, risk assessments are recorded and shared to authorized partners via UICDS And provide actionable information to the POLA/POLB security officers, the respective control rooms, and the 13 jurisdictional agencies responsible for the ports complex

View the Port Security Innovations Tutorial on the UICDS Collaboration Portal.

UICDS ConOps:  Written Sharing Agreements NOT Required, But Some Examples to Consider 

On a UICDS Tutorial and Biweekly call in 2012 everyone learned that a written sharing agreement is NOT required to participate in UICDS. Any type of memorandum of understanding is strictly the decision of the participating agencies and jurisdictions.

UICDS, itself, embodies all of the sharing agreements within the technology.  A simple addition to the Agreement Service with one line in an XML document is all UICDS needs to share data among applications.  This was the point made by Jim Morentz who demonstrated how the UICDS AdminConsole is used to easily create the needed UICDS sharing agreements.

But we recognize that sometimes organizations feel a need to put in writing an agreement about sharing information. To help in those cases, the UICDS Team has gathered different types of information sharing agreements and offers them as examples - not as recommendations or requirements - but just as examples for those who might want to create documents to memorialize their agreements to share.  

In the tutorial we took a look at three levels of sharing agreements, including documents to support each: 

• Data Exchange Workbook - This document is used by organizations to identify what information they wish to share.  In this form of sharing documentation, the workbook itself is the way to memorialize who will share with whom.  No further documents need to be prepared.
• Ancillary Agreement - You ALREADY have made the agreements; use them!  Mutual Aid Agreements and even statutory authority define who shares with whom.  All you need is a single, short document that states that you will share information as needed to carry out the Mutual Aid Agreement or the statute.  If desired, you can reference the UICDS Data Compliance Guide to identify what kinds of data will be shared.
• Formal Memorandum of Agreement - Several pages of legally binding agreement combined with all of the UICDS data entities and exchange standards will give you a document for lawyers to enjoy.  This example of a MOA is provided to get you started if the fully documented path is the one your organization needs to take.

View the entire UICDS Agreements - Not Required, Your Option Tutorial discussion on the UICDS 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.  In the fall, we introduced 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: 

Ask questions and make comments right in the Document Library to share with your colleagues and the UICDS

• 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

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.  

View the complete Guide to Developer Tools Tutorial on the UICDS Collaboration Portal

UICDS Implementation In Michigan Exercises Real-Time National Guard Response to County Emergency 

Ft. Custer to Port Huron Tracking National Guard Response

crossing half of Michigan in support of a simulated emergency that occurr

On a 2012 UICDS Tutorial and Biweekly Call we heard about National Guard troops crossing half of Michigan in support of a simulated emergency that occurred  in Port Huron.  We heard about St. Clair County's implementation of UICDS and the "Resilient" incident management software which was developed by IDV Solutions for the Department of Homeland Security, Directorate of Science and Technology. And we heard about how the incident in St. Clair 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) using UICDS core-to-core sharing.  This led to the deployment of the Michigan 51st Civil Support Team at Ft. Custer which was deployed and tracked for the 200 mile trip in both its home tracking application and the St. Clair application. 

"We successfully shared real-time location 

tracking of the Michigan National Guard 51st Civil 

MCAP Tracker showing location of CST movement responding to Port Huron simulated even

"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." 

The UICDS Tutorial and Biweekly Call (see below) is available for you to hear from Colin Misner of the Mobile Computing Application Platform (MCAP) Project at TARDEC, Ashish Jain of Applied Communication Sciences, Nikki Falk, Homeland Security Planner for St. Clair County, and Richard Whisner, Project Manager at IDV Solutions.  Together they took us across the state showing vehicle progress on both MCAP Tracker and Resilient.  Multiple sources of data and real-time location information were shared through UICDS as were multiple map layers.  

Yellow icons indicate location of National Guard Civil Support Team vehicles as they approach the simulated emergency in Port Huron.

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. 

View the Michigan National Guard Response Tracking Through UICDS Tutorial on the UICDS Collaboration Platform.

It is 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. Here is an overview from mid-summer of the status of implementation and thinking among UICDS participants on the interface between military and civilian responders employing UICDS:

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. NGB will be launching an initial implementation in the spring, plans to roll out to all State Guards in a selected region in the fall, and move to nationwide implementation thereafter.

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. 

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 a Dot Mil UICDS User Group should continue its formation.   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.  Late in 2012 the first Dot Mil UICDS User Group meeting was held with more planned for 2013.

The interface between military and civilian organizations during large-scale emergencies continues to be a critical one. National Guard and regular military become involved in emergency response when the need exceeds local civilian capabilities.  This occurs in formal activations as well as when military personnel act as good citizens supporting their neighbors.

For background on the implementation of UICDS in military and military - civilian settings, take a look at the following UICDS Tutorial recordings:

New Version of UICDS Released

The release of UICDS Version 1.2.1 included backward compatiblity, improved performance in off-nominal network environments, and aligning the UICDS AdminConsole with the Section 508 Amendment to the Rehabilitation Act of 1973.  In addition to these changes to the UICDS code base, the significantly simplified UICDS installation was demonstrated live on the tutorial (see below).  Subsequently, an update (Version 1.2.2) was released with additional ease-of-use improvements.

This version had many updates to the latest versions of open source components used by UICDS including:

• Java JDK 1.7.0_5
• Tomcat 7
• eXist 1.4.2
• OpenFire 3.7.1
• OpenDJ 2.5 

In addition, we improved UICDS performance in off-nominal environments focusing on UICDS core-to-core connectivity in the presence of intermittent network availability.  There is now greater assurance that UICDS Work Products are shared reliably between UICDS cores by incorporating several connection checking features.

In order to facilitate the administration of UICDS by people with disabilities, as guided by Section 508, the UICDS Team incorporated text equivalent labels to the UICDS AdminConsole elements and enabled keyboard-based access to the AdminConsole, among other enhancements.

Finally, on the tutorial below, the UICDS Team showed the significantly reduced UICDS installation process. Demonstrated live on the tutorial was the UICDS InstallKit installation which had its internal processing commands reduced from 108 to 18 and the human interaction during the installation reduced to 3 entries.  The entire installation took under 10 minutes and was greeted by great applause from those "old hands" among UICDS Technology Providers who understood the value of this new release.   

UICDS Featured in California Earthquake Clearinghouse Golden Guardian Exercise Technology Showcase 

The California Earthquake Clearinghouse took advantage of the opportunity of the 2012 Golden Guardian earthquake exercise to conduct a parallel technology showcase of UICDS information sharing.  The Clearinghouse was formed by five federal and state agencies to provide a location, real or virtual, after a damaging earthquake, for engineers, geologists, seismologists, sociologists, economists, and other professionals who arrive in the affected area to share information.  The Clearinghouse facilitates the gathering of information, maximizes its availability, and better uses the talents of those present. "These experts have a wide range of knowledge and experience, and their observations in the field can add substantially to the information available to officials managing response and recovery operations," according to the Clearinghouse.

The Clearinghouse, acting on the decision of the California Emergency Management Agency to specify UICDS compliance in a recent incident management system procurement, has developed a multi-year and mult-exercise plan for implementing UICDS as the central middleware for its information sharing.  The Clearinghouse describes this plan in a document titled California Earthquake Clearinghouse and UICDS available on its website.  

The Technology Showcase included four UICDS Cores shared among seven federal and state agencies to share incident and field observation information.   Twelve applications - sensors, web applications and mobile apps - were used by 100 scientists, engineers, and responders to record 177 observations and reports about incidents unfolding in the three-hour exercise.

The focus of the exercise was on sharing incident information from reports and sensors as well as potential damage locations with scientists and engineers in the field to obtain their observations on the state of the earthquake and share them through UICDS.  

Mobile apps developed by the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute provided field observations from engineers.  The U.S. Geological Survey developed Field Notes, a mobile app for earth scientists and geologists to report on their findings following an earthquake event. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory provided satellite imagery for the California Geological Survey to perform image analysis to suggest physical changes after the earthquake which were shared through UICDS. The Caltrans FiRST Testbed at the University of California, Santa Barbara, simulated Caltrans road sensors in the earthquake area.  

Three UICDS commercial technology providers delivered their applications for the use of the exercise participants. The UISOL Utility Outage Dashboard tracked UICDS incidents related to utilities, SkyLine Network Solutions provided live, dynamic links to California Department of Transportation traffic cameras in the simulated earthquake area, and SpotOnResponse allowed participants to make field observations and associate photos or videos with UICDS incidents.  

The California Earthquake Clearinghouse organized the information sharing technology showcase with UICDS to bring together scientists, engineers, and responders in an information sharing network to improve response and the investigation of damages caused by earthquakes.

View the Golden Guardian Technology Demonstration Tutorial on the UICDS Collaboration Portal.

Daniel Huber is the Common Operational Picture Manager for the Air National Guard Emergency Management.  On a UICDS Tutorial in 2012 he updated us on the ANG plans for UICDS and his own personal experience with UICDS implementation.  As depicted in the deployment diagram below, each of the ANG Wings will have UICDS as the backbone for information sharing to deliver the ANG Common Operational Picture.  In addition, Mr. Huber described how each Wing location will use UICDS to interconnect with counties, localities, and the state to provide seamless military support to civil authorities.

The Air National Guard planned implementation of UICDS for intra-Guard information sharing and Military-Civilian sharing begins at the Wing and extends to civilian applications.

The National Information Exchange Model (NIEM) and UICDS

One 2012 UICDS Tutorial and Biweekly Call session focused on the National Information Exchange Model (NIEM) and UICDS.  We learned about NIEM and how UICDS implements NIEM.

The UICDS Incident Type definition is composed of the entire NIEM Incident Type plus permitted extensions to identify technical details of UICDS Cores

Our session took a look at the history and background of NIEM so that we all shared a common understanding.  We learned that NIEM is an effort of several agencies of the federal government to "be the best practice, by choice, for intergovernmental information exchange. Practitioners at all levels of government and industry will share accurate, complete, timely, and appropriately secured information to enable informed decision making for the greater good."  

We then turned to a review of UICDS as a content manager for incident information and how NIEM elements pervade UICDS where there are no other standards more prevalent. We learned that NIEM "offers a common vocabulary so that when two or more people talk to each other they can exchange information based on common words that they both understand."  

Then we examined the UICDS Incident Work Product (shown here) for its complete adherence to the NIEM schema.  We concluded with a discussion of the other standards that UICDS incorporates and proposed ways in which the UICDS community can get involved in pushing NIEM locally for their own benefit.

"Tell me how this thing really works."

That's a question we often get.  And they aren't asking about web services interfaces and other technical details.  People just want to know how data moves through UICDS. What it looks like when information is shared.  

People tell us that "OK, I've seen demos and I've watched the movies.  And, yes, it is a miracle of

This sequence diagram describes the flow of data through UICDS to respond to the need for an evacuation during a flood.

We discussed this, first, by describing what the data is. Then we turned to the functioning of the different components in the UICDS network. And then we focused on some case studies of data sharing.

We took a look at the sequence and process by which your data magically gets from here to there.  We looked at how the content is managed, a critical differentiator for UICDS from any other information sharing activity. And we looked at the pathway established and the flow from one place to other places.

And back again in the all-important two-way flow of information that distinguishes the UICDS middleware from any other information sharing effort.

In Part II, we walked through a detailed case study of two applications sharing information through UICDS.  We looked at the data as it existed on one application, then in UICDS, and then in the second application we saw the same information.  Then we had one application create an incident that was shared through UICDS to the second application and we saw the map and text data show up.  Then we saw how each application used that data to provide additional value to the application's own end-users.

See below for a glimpse of the step-by-step walk through data sharing between two applications through UICDS. And for a complete look at the whole process, see below for a link to the videoes from the UICDS Tutorials. Both sessions proved to be a great conversation starter for operational and technical people alike.   

SkyLine Technology Solutions led a UICDS Tutorial and Biweekly Call to describe their integration of video cameras in multiple venues and how they enable the broadest form of sharing of cameras through UICDS.

This provided a real-world example of what we have come to call "integration at the integration layer."  This concept was described by John Contestabile of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory a few weeks ago on a UICDS Tutorial. He described how a conceptual framework of information layers (Data, Integration, and Presentation layers) is useful to developing solutions to the lack of interoperability (view the Contestabile tutorial).   

John talked about why information sharing is important to successfully dealing with large scale events and how a lack of public safety communications systems interoperability is a major impediment. He described how a conceptual framework of information layers (Data, Integration, and Presentation layers) is useful to developing solutions to the lack of interoperability. At the conclusion of his presentation, John talked about a pilot program underway in video information sharing which will be the topic of Brian's presentation.

Brian Holsonbake, CEO of SkyLine Technology Solutions takes the interoperability framework concept and turns it into an operational reality with video information sharing.  Using the concepts of information layers, and recent integration with UICDS, SkyLine has achieved significant video interoperability. At SkyLine, Brian is the lead architect for unifying multiple networks within the Maryland Department of Transportation and was also part of the team that developed networkMaryland. He will talk about these experiences and the integration of SkyLine technologies with UICDS.  

Outage Management Interoperability Between Utility Companies and Emergency Management Agencies Through UICDS

Another UICDS Tutorial centered on a demonstration of integrating at the "integration layer" in collaboration between utility outage management applications and emergency management operations.     

This was described by Mark Wald of Utility Integration Solutions (UISOL). As Mark said, he was "struck by similarities in UICDS and work in the electric power utility industry. The power industry has for many years (perhaps twenty or more) struggled with silos of information and the inability of systems to interoperate (sometimes even from the same vendor)." 

UISOL Outage Management Through UICDS

Mark discussed how the utility industry has produced interoperability results with the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) Common Information Model (CIM) which allows different vendors and solutions to interoperate and share power system domain information. Connecting with the CIM standard data, UICDS is integrating at the integration layer and delivering added value to formerly isolated data.

Mark showed how UICDS can be a path for utility interoperation with emergency operations in an application that UISOL has developed to demonstrate this new integration capability.   The demo shows how UICDS "fractional data" that is relevant for emergency applications combines with utility outage data to share to increase collaboration, awareness, and resource coordination during an incident.  CIM provides a standard utility definition of the "fractional data" needed by emergency organizations to effectively support management of utility incidents.  

The Common Information Model connected to UICDS produces an effective link between utility outage and public safety.

The International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) Common Information Model (CIM) provides the basis for enterprise interoperability and information sharing in the utility market.  The CIM allows different vendors and solutions to interoperate and share power system domain information. CIM provides a standard utility definition of the data layer, some fraction of which is needed by emergency organizations to effectively support management of utility incidents.  Linking the CIM-based utility enterprise bus-based architecture with the UICDS peer-to-peer cloud architecture middleware can produce public - private sector information sharing.  

For more information in a high-level integration design working paper, get Utility Industry Looking to UICDS as Link Between Operational Outages and Incident Management Agencies.

New Jersey Business Force's Business Emergency Operations Center (BEOC) Supported by UICDS Through New Jersey Institute of Technology Pilot 

Michael Chumer, PhD, is Research Professor (honorary retired) within the Department of Information Systems at New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT) specializing in Homeland Security and Emergency Management. In that capacity he directs the current NJIT MS Emergency Management and Business Continuity program as well as co-advises Ph.D. students interested in the technologies and systems that support response and recovery behavior.  He focuses on the mission and direction of the BEOC Alliance as well as directing the implementation and adaptation of the BEOC public/private sector communication model both in the United States and overseas. 

New Jersey BEOC 

The BEOC is a Private Sector organized, managed, and staffed emergency coordination/operations center focused on all-hazards disaster prevention, preparation, response, and recovery. Its goal is to make the Private Sector self-reliant and self-sufficient during emergencies and disasters through information sharing and shared situational awareness. The BEOC is being jointly developed through a collaborative effort between academia, led by the NJ Institute of Technology (NJIT), business, as represented by the New Jersey Business Force (NJBF), and the Armament Research Development and Engineering Center (ARDEC) Picatinny Arsenal. The NJ BEOC is recognized by FEMA as one of the leading examples of public-private cooperation for emergency management.   

National Level Exercise Experience at NJIT

The New Jersey Institute of Technology worked closely with ARDEC to employ numerous tools using the Common Alerting Protocol to form National Level Exercise (NLE) alerts throughout the 2011 and 2012 national exercise.  From multiple sources including NC4s External Situational Awareness tool, the NJIT CAP message tool shared CAP alerts through UICDS and elevated significant CAP alerts into UICDS incidents that were then shared among other pilot sites.  

Crowd-Sourcing, Secure Portal, and Cyber Events

Mike also discussed the use of various tools to engage in crowd-source of information related to emergencies as well as the implementation of a secure portal for the BEOC.  He concluded with a look at plans for the 2012 NLE cyber event.

View the NJ BEOC Tutorial on the UICDS Collaboration Platform. 

UICDS Update Sponsor

 

To learn more about sponsoring UICDS activities, please contact the UICDS Team.