Copyright © 2015 Open Geospatial Consortium.
13 organized way. The information itself is generated at all organizational levels using a
variety of technologies as well as human observers. In case of an disaster, not only does geo-referenced GIS data need to be integrated, but lots of other types, such as tables,
reports, images, field observations, diagrams, or checklists need to be served as well. Those types cannot be easily represented in traditional GIS.
The clearinghouse started in 1971 with five managing partners, the California Geological Survey, the US Geological Survey, California Office of Emergency Services, Earthquake
Engineering Research Institute, California Safety Commission. In case of an emergency, the entire range of organizations makes use of the clearinghouse, including organizations
dealing with utilities, emergency responders, researchers, etc.
7.2.2 Data Services
Data provided by the USGS is key to several partner organizations of the California Clearinghouse. The data includes aerial photography, various remote sensing data,
LIDAR, several national map products, sensor networks e.g. provided by the Department of Water Resources or earthquake sensing devices, the Geospatial Multi-
Agency Coordination platform GeoMAC, National Hydrography Dataset NHD, Fire and Hazard REST services from the Natural Hazard Support System NHSS, Hazards
Data Distribution System HDDS Explorer. The following figure represents the technology decisions taken by the California Governors Office of Emergency Services.
Figure 4: CalEOS technology decisions
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Copyright © 2015 Open Geospatial Consortium.
CalEOS has adaptors to a number of technologies, e.g. WebEOS, ArcGIS online, Unified Incident Command and Decision Support UICDS, and a number of other technologies
used in the field or by other organizations. The UICDS middleware plays a central role for data communication. A key challenge in the past has been to communicate and to
work collaboratively on geospatial information with other agencies and organizations in the geospatial world, given that there are roughly 150-200 different interfaces geospatial
and non-geospatial that exit in common emergency management tools and related services. UICDS represents data in a number of standard formats that come from the
geospatial community, the emergency management community, or the military. Formats include OGC formats such as KML, GML, and OM; or NIEM which uses GML for
encoding locationgeographic elements. Arriving data is converted into the best fitting standard for a particular use. This approach allows the use a single platform for
representing geospatial information: ArcGIS online. Putting all geospatial information on ArcGIS online has solved the problem of the high number of different interfaces and
formats to a large extent, as long as the necessary software licenses can be afforded by all participating organizations.
The various text-based or report-based incident information systems used in the past have been superseded by a customized version of WebEOC, an incident management system
developed by Intermedix Corp. Though WebEOC has a viewer component, it is not really a GIS tool. Therefore, geospatial information received from the various levels local to
regional to state and federal level gets ported to ArcGIS online for efficient collaboration with external partners. This approach ensures that data is aggregated as necessary and
consistently communicated across all organizations involved in the disaster management operation. Being synchronized at the state level, it is ensured that all organizations can
view the same data, even though with their specific client applications that uses adapted representations.
The key role of UICDS is further illustrated in the figure 5. This figure illustrates the coordination, communication and data orchestration, between a number of organizations
in an earthquake event, where there is limited time for data discovery. Incoming data needs to be analyzed and combined with other existing data, new data is produced as a
result, and new maps are dynamically created with multiple layers. All these data become part of the Common Operational Data COD, which is exchanged between systems
using various UICDS middleware implementations, operated by organizations on various administrative levels. Therefore, the efficient integration of any data set into the UICDS
middleware layer is critical.
The connection between the UICDS, WebEOC, and ArcGIS online allows the definition of new layers based on existing information, and enables this data to be pushed back and
forth between the various systems. As an example, a layer based on a feature selection within ArcGIS online can be pushed into UICDS as a Web Map Context Layer. In the
future, using OWS Context instead of Web Map Context would provide additional functionality.
