OASIS - Structured Emergency Management Data

OASIS (www.oasis-open) is laying the groundwork for a sea change in how emergency management is handled. Elysa Jones heads up their technical committe and has been a tireless contributor for years (pro-bono).

Common Alerting Protocol, conceived in the late 90s/early 2000 is now becoming a world standard and saving countless lives with severe weather warnings (NOAA), Earthquake reporting (USGS), Tsunami Warning, and a host of other time senstive threats. CAP is easy to use, interoperabe so that you don't have to buy certain software, multi-lingual and other key constructs. There is nothing competitive to it that can handle the general nature of emergency alerts. FEMA has chosen CAP for their years after Katrina Integrated Public Alert and Warning System (IPAWS).

EDXL-DE (a stndardized delivery package that can address both explicit and functional addressees) and a host of other standards are either released or in development:
1. Resource Messaging: instead of random phone calls and the good old boy method of borrowing needed resources - EDXL RM brings a scalable, complete method for acquiring people, equipment, and other key resources using XML transactions.
2. HAVE: Don't you think hospitals should be able to report status (beds, doctors, and other vital information) automatically to the 9-1-1 centers so they are informed when it comes to a life or death decision of what hospital to route an accident patient to? Its all manual, but the Hospital Availability Standard makes this achieveable without massive cost.
3. Tracking of Emergency Patients
4. SITREPS: you would think that one standardized set of info that could e shared would make sense. It would. Everyone does it differently, including every federal agency, state, and local group. EDXL SITREP will change this.

And there is more......they won't throw in Ginzu knives, but this non-profit, tireless organization is working to fix the huge problems that exist today in the Emergency Management world. Kudos, kudos, kudos.