Emergency Data Awareness: Sharing Under Stress

Abstract

The ability to get information to and from those who need to know in a time of an emergency, during large planned event, or even for daily operations can be a challenging problem. Emergency asset and situational awareness information might be available in any number of locations and formats, and access to that information is typically embedded in vertical applications and controlled by local authorities. Based on a contract from the Department of Homeland Security to create an operational prototype for a potential national deployment, Raytheon worked with the Tampa, Florida Police Department and with the vendors of highly capable operational and planning tools to create a Web portal system that allows a user to search for data seamlessly across multiple systems and databases using a common standards-based query mechanism. The SafetyNet prototype system has characteristics similar to other regional information sharing efforts like N-DEx, the Law Enforcement National Data Exchange, although SafetyNet has a more general information focus. SafetyNet could become a source, feeding into these other systems, or a user of the aggregated data, combining Law Enforcement data with other data sources. The goal of the SafetyNet is to improve the comprehensiveness and timeliness of data to emergency responders by providing a standard universal mechanism that merges that resource data stored in the differently formatted and configured databases into a single, virtual, federated, networked system. During the requirements process, we added the note that we did not intend to displace existing systems in the Tampa Police organization.