Standards & Initiatives
Commitment to Open Standards
OPEN provides non-proprietary Application Programmer Interface (API) specifications, documentation and support at no cost to the emergency responder community, and vendors supporting that community through the Department of Homeland Security.
Organization for the Advancement of Structure Information Systems (OASIS)
OPEN supports, in particular, the implementation of Emergency Data Exchange Language (EDXL) standards developed by the OASIS Emergency Management Technical Committee.
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OASIS News: Boston, MA, USA; 8 January 2009 -
OASIS Members Approve Emergency Data Exchange Standards for Resource Messaging and Hospital Availability
Current standards include:
- Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) Version 1.1, (PDF, 168 KB)
- EDXL Distribution Element (EDXL-DE), (PDF, 195 KB)
- EDXL Hospital Availability Exchange (EDXL-HAVE), (PDF, 655 KB)
- EDXL Resource Messaging (RM), (PDF, 2.39 MB)
Implementation of OASIS standards planned for the future include:
- Situation Reporting (SITREP)
National Information Exchange Model (NIEM)
As a Federal program within the Department of Homeland Security, DM-OPEN is also fully committed to supporting National Information Exchange Model (NIEM) messaging standards.
By implementation of the EDXL-DE, OPEN is already operational capable of transporting NIEM messages, as well as any standard XML (or DE-“wrapped” non-XML payload) between systems of all kinds.
Related Initiatives
National Weather Service HazCollect
For current implementation status, see the National Weather Service's HazCollect Web site.
NIMS Supporting Technology Evaluation Program (NIMS STEP)
The purpose of the NIMS Supporting Technology Evaluation Program (NIMS STEP) is to provide an independent, objective evaluation of commercial and government hardware and software products related to incident management to assist in the implementation of the NIMS.
Open Source Implementation Projects
As a service to OPEN developers, the following links are provided to known Open Source projects implementing the OASIS standards:
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