Core services are common shared tools, services, and resources offered through a collective effort of the emergency response community. They enable interoperability and are available for use by authorized emergency entities. These services can include authentication and authorization, security and auditing, digital rights management, data discovery and transformation and agency locator directory.  By using these shared core services, agencies do not have to spend their limited funds creating and maintaining these functions on their own (and convincing corresponding agencies to trust their functions).

THE NEED

Despite the lessons learned from 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina, much of the emergency services community remains without modern, interoperable emergency communications technology. In an emergency, agencies need the ability to share critical information, but in order to do so they must first know what organizations need the information, how to find them, and where (computer, radio frequency/CODECs, or other) to send or retrieve the information when necessary. These are some of the issues being solved through core services. Non-proprietary applications to provide this routing information to the wide variety of interoperability and messaging services and applications used in the emergency services community currently do not exist. Similarly, there are no common standards for inter-organizational identity management and access control so the appropriate decision makers (who are different depending on the incident type and the area it covers) can electronically implement interoperability and security policies.

COMCARE’S APPROACH

Two critical core services must be present for data to be efficiently and effectively shared in the emergency response environment. The first is the agency locator service, called the Emergency Provider Access Directory, or EPAD. EPAD is a registry of organizations, their incident interests and geographic boundaries associated with those interests, where and how incident information should be sent, and the CODECs of IP gateways to their radio systems. This service enables geospatially-targeted information exchange and radio interoperability. The second critical service is an Identity Management and Access Control module that authenticates users and houses the rules for sending, receiving, and viewing incident information, and connecting radio systems. COMCARE has done a great deal of work on the requirements and detailed design of these services, and they are ready to be developed for use in the field.  

COMCARE is working with the National Association of State Fire Marshals (NASFM), the National Emergency Number Association (NENA), and the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) to advance a joint Core Services Interoperability Pilot Initiative to highlight the capabilities and benefits of interoperable emergency communications technologies. The short-term goals of the Initiative are to:

• Enable every authorized organization responding to emergencies to send geospatially targeted data messages to and from every other relevant organization, including to organizations which in turn will send warnings and alerts to the appropriate public for all hazards;
  
  
• Enable the use of Internet Protocol software to link radio, cellular and telephone systems together (a partial form of radio interoperability), including linking competing applications of radio over IP; and,
  
  
• Help a technology partner(s) build and deploy the initial versions of these two Core Services to enable effective and appropriate versions of (1) and (2).

FROM VISION TO REALITY

By demonstrating interoperability enabled by core services, first in a pilot testbed and then in a field trial, both industry and the emergency community will have an operational exemplar that they can use to more rapidly mobilize standards-based interoperable solutions that will improve effectiveness and efficiency in communications, decision making, and response to emergencies. 

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