Data Exchange (EDI)
In public safety systems, standards are under discussion to allow disparate systems to exchange call information. For example, a call taker at the county fire department receives a call for an auto accident inside a city limit. Evolving standards will allow CAD systems to send messages to one another for calls originating outside local jurisdiction. Some entities have arrangements that already support data exchange between systems, but standards aim to make these interconnections more common. Because of auditing trail and fail-safe needs, the problem is more complex than it sounds.
The usage of EDI applied to CAD is specific to the law enforcement community and should not be confused with Electronic Document Interchange (EDI) standards for eCommerce. Within law enforcement EDI is used as a buzzword to represent all electronic automated messaging.
More mature efforts to interconnect CAD can be found in the standards developed for the Intelligent Transportation Initiatives program of Department of Transportation. This initiative sponsored the IEEE 1512 series of protocols for emergency management which provides sophisticated means to coordinate incidents across operations centers using CAD software.
Additional work is occurring under the National Information Exchange Model to link homeland security with CAD. Also the OASIS international standards body has produced standards funded in part by the DHS and the disaster management e-gov initiative to communicate in emergencies.
Other interoperability technologies can bridge disparities between the data-format, software, and hardware that constitute various computer-aided dispatch systems in various jurisdictions. Middleware, software and servers (data brokers), can translate and integrate various systems into a seamless automated dispatch system. One example of such middleware (provided by Utah-based FATPOT Technologies/CII) exists in Orange County, Calif., where the Fire Authority has integrated different emergency service answering points into a seamless dispatching network. A similar project was completed for the Silicon Valley Regional Interoperability Project (SVRIP), and is part of the Dept. of Homeland Security's CADIP report.
Read more about this topic: Computer-aided Dispatch
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