Geospatial Information

Whither Grid Standards

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On last Friday’s phone call about advancing the OpenADR specification to a national and perhaps international standard, we agreed to continue the discussion in an open forum at the OASIS site (www.OASIS-Open.org). OASIS, or the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards, has long been the home for the underpinnings of e-commerce, for web security, and for service oriented architecture. OASIS is also home to a number of domain-specific standards, such as LegalXML, Open Office, and OpenDocs as well as the foundational web services registry UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration).

OpenADR (Automated Demand Response) is a California developed specification developed for...

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Buildings, Emergency Response, and Situation Awareness

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This week twenty of us met at NIST to discuss situation awareness during emergencies. The centerpiece of the conversation was the NG911 system, or Next Generation 911. NG911 supports better interaction between call centers, and uses policy-based security to let other local call centers, or even centers in other regions take calls as circumstances and policy require. Private call centers, run by alarm services, can be full peers if local policy allows. Even buildings, and building systems, might act as 911 operators. The conveners asked me to lead an effort to develop a security model for these systems.

Interoperability at this level requires standardization of security, of policy management, and even of building semantics. 911 centers will...

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