Hand in hand

Have you shaken hands with your local police officer today? If not, a new initiative may make it worth your while.

The U.S. Departments of Transportation and Justice have funded a $1 million grant to identify technologies to help transportation and public-safety agencies better share critical information, especially during emergency situations. A 15-person committee formed in 2005, the ITS/Public Safety Exchange Committee, which includes local, state and federal public-sector and industry leaders, is responsible for carrying out this cutting-edge work.

Here are three reasons transportation agencies should be interested in learning more:

• More efficient use of already-stretched resources. Broken, incomplete or nonexistent communication regarding law enforcement activities and their impact on transportation facilities costs money in a myriad of ways. For instance, last-minute actions as well as your department’s provision of services already being handled by law enforcement unnecessarily tie up valuable staff, budgets, vehicles, materials, etc.;
• Lessened impact of emergencies on transportation operations. Improving overall communication between transportation and public safety can do nothing but improve government responses to large emergencies. Imagine the potential mitigating effects these technologies might have during extreme weather conditions or terrorist threats; and
• Free technology. The results of the ITS/Public Safety Exchange Committee’s efforts will be free of charge and repeatable in a wide variety of technical environments. The only costs will be associated with any minor programming that may have to be done to have the exchanges interface with a particular technical environment.

The project is delivering numerous benefits in real-time data communications between transportation and public safety. Included among these are 12 standardized “exchanges,” the GJXDM/IEEE 1512 Compatibility Analysis Report and a pilot implementation. Each is introduced below.

A common vocabulary

The committee has focused its effort on the development of a dozen exchanges, centered on planned events, incidents, road conditions and requests for service. Specifically, these exchanges are:

1. Incident notification;
2. Incident status update;
3. Incident summary;
4. Request incident list;
5. Event information;
6. Event list;
7. Request for specific event information;
8. Request event list;
9. Request for service (assistance);
10. Decision response;
11. Request road conditions; and
12. Road conditions.

Once implemented, these exchanges will enable local systems to transmit data from a transportation database resulting in messages that can be understood (and acted upon) by public-safety officials. The process also can work in reverse, with information originating from law enforcement going to transportation. For example, if the state patrol reports a hazardous spill via their dispatch system, the data can be instantly transferred to show up on a traffic-operations message board. No hassle, no interpreter needed and, most importantly, no time lost.

The industry-defined technical standards that drive how such information is packaged and transmitted are different for each of these communities: for transportation it is generally ITS-based (IEEE 1512) while public safety has traditionally used the Global Justice XML Data Model (GJXDM).

Data is stored in the respective databases utilizing the local database structure and formats. For example, an exchange going from public safety to transportation would be formatted in the GJXDM XML format by the public-safety system. The message would be transformed into a IEEE 1512 message by the appropriate transformation stylesheet and then forwarded to the receiving transportation system. The reverse also is true. Note that each system imports and exports messages in their respective standard.

The committee has sought ways for the two very different standards to work together, and the result has been to include transformation stylesheets with the exchanges, which transform the messages from one standard to the other.

The 12 standardized exchanges are provided by way of an Information Exchange Package Documentation (IEPD). This “developers kit” supplies implementers with the tools they need to implement the standard exchanges. Another important deliverable, the GJXDM/IEEE 1512 Compatibility Analysis Report, has already been completed. During the work on the exchanges and in taking a look at how the two standards can work together, several findings were revealed as well as some lessons learned. Although the complete details can be found in the published report, the major conclusions included (excerpted from the report):

• While both standards define data structures and elements using XML schema, the IEEE 1512 provides a more complete set of messages for traffic-related incident management exchanges, while the GJXDM provides a more flexible set of content, leaving it up to the implementer to define the messages appropriate for each exchange;
• There is significant overlap in the content of the two standards due to the reuse of several large GJXDM data structures in the IEEE 1512 specification;
• Due to the focus of the specification on traffic-related incident management, the IEEE 1512 specification mapped to a much higher percentage of properties in the data model for the 12 information exchanges than the GJXDM; and
• The eXtensible Stylesheet Language Transformation (XSLT) language is a feasible option for implementing transformations to convert between GJXDM and IEEE 1512 representations of the same exchange.

Proof of 10-4

The committee wants to fully test the exchange product. To address this, a current pilot implementation is being conducted in Houston. Two of the exchanges—incident notification and incident status update—are in the process of being implemented between Houston’s Transtar facility and the Harris County Toll Road Authority (HCTRA). This pilot will serve as a proof-of-value implementation and also will serve to test the exchanges and demonstrate their benefits. The effort will result in lessons learned for additional future implementations of the ITS/PS exchanges.

At the center of this effort is the IJIS Institute, serving as the central hub for coordinating the initiative. The IJIS Institute’s mission is to contribute to the successful implementation of integrated justice information systems nationwide by promoting the expertise, knowledge and experience of the information technology (IT) industry in a way that benefits both the private and public sectors. The IJIS Institute, based in Ashburn, Va., provides this type of assistance to public-sector agencies by managing grant projects, delivering training and education, providing technology assistance, undertaking research and collaborating with key public-sector, nonprofit organizations and private industry to improve information sharing. For further information about the institute or how to access the exchange work products, contact IJIS (www.ijis.org).

For additional information about this project visit the project website (www.its.dot.gov/ps_transinfoexchange .htm).

In the meantime, think again about how reaching out to that law enforcement officer makes more and more sense.