GIS in National Security

UICDS - Unified Incident Command and Decision Support National Middleware

—James Morentz, SAIC

Geospatial information is one component of any incident management decision. Enabling the sharing of geospatial information across applications is the goal of UICDS, Unified Incident Command and Decision Support, a national middleware being fielded in pilots across the country by the Department of Homeland Security, Directorate of Science and Technology. UICDS is the "middleware foundation" that enables information sharing and decision support among commercial and government incident management technologies used to support the National Response Framework (NRF) and National Incident Management System (NIMS), including the Incident Command Structure (ICS), in order to prevent, protect, respond, and recover from natural, technological, and terrorist events. UICDS has no user interface, so it does not impose a new application or new training on operators or interfere with the commercial marketplace. UICDS employs OGC, among other, standards to establish common data exchanges through its web services interfaces. In addition to geospatial data, UICDS enables sharing of incident command structures, including people and resources, EDXL-RM-based resource requests and commitments, CAP messages, sensor observations, a host of geospatial data formats, Incident Action Plans and ICS forms and operation procedures and tasking. In short, UICDS represents all the critical information to manage an incident across the applications that actually do the detailed, agency-level management.