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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.

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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.

Current standards include:

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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