Public Safety Data Exchange

Background

Transportation, law enforcement, fire, and emergency medical personnel are discovering significant improvements to public safety can be achieved if information is shared across organizational and jurisdictional boundaries. Equipment and personnel can be more efficiently deployed, incidents can be cleared faster and incident scenes can be made safer for the responders and the traveling public. Recognizing the potential safety and mobility benefits, an increasing number of public safety and transportation agencies wish to link their information systems.

Despite the potential safety and mobility benefits, agencies initiating such projects face formidable challenges as they attempt to interconnect disparate data communication systems from the public safety and transportation communities. Among the technical challenges these agencies encounter is how to utilize applicable information standards from the separate, but interrelated communities. These standards include the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) supported IEEE 1512 series and the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) supported Global Justice XML Data Model (GJXDM).

DOJ is currently supporting the Global Law Enforcement Information Technology Standards Committee, led by the International Association of Chiefs of Police, in developing Reference Information Exchange Documents that standardize reporting information, and will soon begin to address the needs of first responders and real-time information exchange. This project addresses the standardizing of the exchange of such information with traffic managers concerning activities of joint interest, now only covered in IEEE 1512.

Purpose and Approach

The purpose of this work is to facilitate the exchange of incident-related information among transportation and public safety agencies by registering key parts of IEEE 1512 with the GJXDM. This work will build upon previous ITS and DOJ information exchange activities and will develop a common configuration management approach and tool set for information systems. It will fuse already standardized public safety data concepts used within transportation data systems with the integrated justice information framework established by DOJ’s Global Justice Information Sharing Initiative (Global) Advisory Committee (GAC).

This project will focus the attention of national associations, public sector deploying agencies, and the commercial vendor community upon implementing multi-agency information solutions that satisfy the need for interoperable data systems. The major emphasis will be on the development of tools that facilitate the exchange of incident information among public safety information systems and ITS information systems.

The project will be divided into two phases. Phase 1 will develop a common information sharing solution and conduct limited testing. Phase 2 will test and evaluate the solution in operational settings and develop guidance material for the user community. Only Phase 1 is addressed in this statement of work.

Phase 1 Tasks

Task 1. Assessment, Definition, and Outreach. Promote this effort with leading public safety and transportation professional associations, through the IEEE and Global. Solicit the involvement of these communities through their representation in these organizations in defining a common public safety and transportation information exchange design that is compatible with both IEEE 1512 and the GJXDM. Cooperatively analyze the GJXDM and the IEEE 1512 standards and determine the tailoring necessary to make IEEE 1512 compatible with the GJXDM.

Task 2. Add Transportation Linkages into Justice Information Framework. Develop a Reference Information Exchange Document (RIED), suitable for implementing the exchange of incident information between a public safety information system and an Intelligent Transportation System. Produce and document the supporting schema necessary to implement the RIED. Incorporate the RIED into the GJXDM. Verify the accessibility of ITS data concepts by public safety users, and of public safety data concepts by ITS users.

Task 3: Validate the Linkages. Evaluate the correctness and utility of the RIED with generic information in a prototypical implementation. Demonstrate the effectiveness of exchanging of information between public safety and transportation. Refine the design as required, according to findings during demonstrations.

Task 4: Provide Technical Assistance to State and Local Early Adopters. DOJ plans to establish a national help desk and other technical assistance activities for early implementers of GJXDM. Some early implementers may also implement transportation information exchange capabilities developed in Tasks 1–3, above, who will also need assistance. This task will provide new transportation-related reference material for use by the DOJ technical assistance activity.

Phase 2 Tasks

Phase 2 tasking will depend upon the successful incorporation of public safety/transportation information exchange capabilities into the GJXDM. Several early implementation sites will be selected. At each, the effectiveness of the new public safety/transportation information exchange capabilities will be objectively evaluated in a field environment. Any improvements found during these field evaluations will be proposed as changes to either the reference information exchange document, the GJXDM or IEEE 1512, as may be appropriate.