Extreme events are large-scale incidents that risk major loss of life, property, and the general well being of our citizens. These events include domestic acts of terrorism, major natural disasters, and manmade accidents of significant consequences. Such incidents necessitate precise action coordination between military, federal, state, and local agencies, many of which may not interact on a regular basis, to effectively perform seamless crisis and consequence management.
Military, Emergency response, emergency management, and Government Leaders recognize the need for an information system that will facilitate a quick response to an incident of this level and manage assets effectively. It is also well known within this community that the system in place is insufficient to meet the needs of an extreme event.
Increased terrorist activity in this country has brought the need for the development of interoperable communications to the forefront. The proliferation of nuclear, biological, or chemical (NBC) weapons and their means of delivery is not a hypothetical threat. More than 25 countries have - or may be developing - NBC weapons along with the means to deliver them. In addition to terrorism, the threat of military use of nuclear biological or chemical weapons on a domestic target cannot be dismissed as fantasy. It is an issue of immediate concern that chaos would surely ensue with the inadequate system in place today.
To address this urgent situation, CoyoteWorks Technologies, the National Institute for Urban Search and Rescue (NI/USR) in collaboration with the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA), technology consultants, military and emergency management leaders, as well as corporate and government sponsors have embarked on the XII Proof of Concept Project. In producing this Proof of Concept, CoyoteWorks was engaged to provide the Needs Assessment and architecture framework to create an information system that can provide integrated crisis response and consequence management information at the right level of abstraction needed to drive effective human-computer interfaces on the users' workstations.
The Xtreme Information Infrastructure (XII) Project, undertaken by NI/USR, involves the development of a large-scale coordinated National Interagency Response System. The mission of the Xtreme Information Infrastructure project is to provide an information infrastructure to broker data and information quickly enough to influence and minimize loss in a life-or-death extreme event. The XII Intelligent Data Fusion System resolves the problems of heterogeneous databases by utilizing commercial off the shelf (COTS) technology to provide a service layer that isolates the rigidity of legacy data applications from dynamic changes in real-world environments. Components in the XII Intelligent Data Fusion System gather data from myriad collection of dispersed sources and intelligently transforms the heterogeneous databases, stovepipe applications, sensor-based subsystems and simulations, unstructured data, semantic content, into virtual knowledge bases.
In the XII architecture, the interlinking of all "stakeholders" in the protection of life and property: federal, state, local, military, commerce, utilities, public and private interests, can communicate within secure boundaries in the urgent response to a terrorist threat for both Force Protection and civilian risk. With minimal expansion and additional buy-ins from any remaining stovepipes, a national target date for implementing such a capability can be realized.
In order to facilitate the acceptance of such an interlinking architecture as XII, the National Association for Urban Search and Rescue and the National Emergency Management Association (NEMA) have engaged in a series of meeting, symposia, conferences and demonstrations over the past three years.