MASAS Integrated Public Alerting and Warning System IPAWS

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8.2.2 MASAS

The Multi-Agency Situational Awareness System MASAS initiative is a collaborative effort of Canadian emergency management agencies and content providers, co-led by GeoConnections and the Centre for Security Science, to develop a national capability for the exchange of geospatial emergency incident information. Based on open and interoperable standards, the system will combine information from multiple sources to support decision-making through improved situational awareness for participating organizations. An opportunity exists to study the required standards, both existing and potential, for decision fusion processes within MASAS. GeoConnections responded to the Fusion Study Phase 2 RFI with the MASAS architecture. The MASAS Architecture was developed in response to requirements from the public safety and security community. It has been used to design and deploy component MASAS systems for Multi-Agency incident information sharing. The opportunity exists to expand MASAS to a number of other decision fusion applications such as the fusion of science-based emergency response information and cross-border information fusion. Additionally, the MASAS initiative could benefit from many of the study areas identified in the RFI-2 for fusion standards. Figure 5 – Decision Fusion in a distributed environment Source: NR Canada MASAS

8.2.3 Integrated Public Alerting and Warning System IPAWS

IPAWS is designed to improve public safety through the rapid dissemination of emergency messages to as many people as possible over as many communications devices as possible. The US Department of Homeland Security FEMA is upgrading the alert and warning infrastructure so that no matter what the crisis, the public will receive life-saving information. In IPAWS, several project initiatives are using EDXL messaging technologies to enhance and expand the alerting capabilities available to emergency pyright © 2010 Open Geospatial Consortium 17 18 Co responders, incident managers, and public officials at all levels of government to inform and advise the public as shown in Figure 6. • Common Alerting Protocol CAP • EDXL Distribution Element EDXL-DE • EDXL Hospital Availability Exchange EDXL-HAVE • EDXL Resource Management EDXL-RM Figure 6 - IPAWS Architecture

8.2.4 Enterprise Scenarios