Border securityCross-border security application integrates data from diverse sources

IDV Solutions the other day announced that Blue Water Area Resilient, an application built on its Visual Fusion software and used by public safety and security agencies along the U.S.-Canada border, has been accepted into a national data-sharing initiative. Integration with the Unified Incident Command and Decision Support (UICDS) program will allow agencies using the application automatically to share information in response to disasters, including terrorist events.

The UICDS integration is part of the upcoming third phase of Virtual City, a DHS pilot project based in St. Clair County, Michigan. Under the Virtual City project, IDV Solutions, with St. Clair County and other U.S. and Canadian partners, developed an application to unite data from local, regional, and federal public safety agencies in a common operating picture. The application relies on IDV’s Visual Fusion, software that can unite data from virtually any source in interactive, web-based visualizations.

As part of the new project phase beginning in February, IDV Solutions and its partners will connect the Virtual City application to UICDS. UICDS is software that continuously receives and shares data in standardized formats. UICDS can accept data from any security related system — including video surveillance systems, dispatch systems, incident management software, geospatial applications, sensors, and intelligence tools — and publish it in a standard format, which agencies can subscribe to and use in their own applications.  Once an agency subscribes to another agency’s data through UICDS, sharing becomes seamless and automatic. UICDS was created under a DHS initiative to enable data sharing among all homeland security and emergency management organizations, from local to national level.

“Becoming part of the UICDS initiative will only increase the value of the Virtual City application and Visual Fusion,” said St. Clair County Emergency Management director Jeffrey A. Friedland. “It will put more current, relevant information in the hands of incident commanders and first responders, and improve their ability to act effectively in an emergency.”

The company says that Visual Fusion was chosen as the Virtual City platform because it offered the many partner agencies a way quickly to connect their diverse systems and data in a shared, Web-based view. Visual Fusion is integrated with Microsoft’s SharePoint content management software, and includes native connectors for databases like SQL Server, Oracle, and ArcGIS. It unites the agencies’ data with feeds available from Web sources (weather, road and air traffic, nautical conditions), and displays the data on an interactive map and timeline. This visualization provides a visual command center view that can be viewed through a web browser or an iPad app.