Enhancement of the Geospatial Data Model Adoption for Emergency Response

In 2010, CalOES, in partnership with the Homeland Security Regional Technology Center (RTC) at San Diego State University, was awarded a USGS National Spatial Data Infrastructure (NSDI) Cooperative Agreement Program (CAP) grant in support of the Federal Geographic Data Committee (FGDC).  Changing technology, economic conditions, and competing priorities have necessitated many changes to this project over time, however, this report represents the state-of-the-art art in the application of geospatial information to incident management.

The final report describes the adoption of UICDS, the Unified Incident Command Decision Support middleware to achieve geospatial data sharing and interoperability in the emergency management environment.  UICDS has emerged as a national standard, developed by the Department of Homeland Security, Directorate of Science and Technology, which occurred at the same time that Department of Homeland Security stopped support for the GeoData Model (GDM) and the San Diego Regional Technology Center was dissolved due to lack of funding.  Thus, while this project did not take the path that was originally proposed, the result is a cutting edge description of the relationship and role of geospatial information in emergency management.

UICDS operates in the middle of a three-tier conceptualization of information exchange that includes a data layer, an integration layer, and a presentation layer.  This project focuses at the interface between the data layer and the integration layer – defining the data that is essential for integration and subsequent exchange among presentation layer applications.  The data model presented in the report focuses specifically on the nexus of geospatial information and incident information.

The final report consists of four sections:  
•    Emergency Management Incident And Geospatial Data Model Concept – page 3
•    The Geospatial Data Model for Emergency Management – page 5
•    Looking Ahead To Operationalizing The Data Model – page 16
•    Project Chronology And Narrative – page 18 

Final Report

Interim Report (Nov 2010) -- Interim Report (June 2012) -- Interim Report (October 2012) -- Interim Report (May 2013)

California Emergency Management Agency

Contacts:

Diane Vaughan
916-845-8542
Diane.Vaughan@calema.ca.gov