Technical development ~ Technical and Organisational Standards

 

 

Summary

 

"ICT is both a focus for standardization programs, and a means for disseminating standards among the relevant actors. Technical standards are essential for ICT in any sector; without agreement on which technology will be used for which purposes, it is difficult to build information systems that enable organizations to communicate with each other. Professional standards provide a basis for individuals and organizations to implement those technologies, offering regulations and guidelines for good practice. In order to be most effective, the ICT4Peace community needs to develop both of these types of standards. The sector is relatively recent and, as a result, there is a lot of work to be done here; however, a few initiatives have already been somewhat successful."

 

Excerpt from The Role of ICT in Preventing, Responding to and Recovering from Conflict, published by the ICT4Peace Foundation.

 

 

Resources

 

Tampere Convention on the Provision of Telecommunication Resources for Disaster Mitigation and Relief Operations

http://www.reliefweb.int/telecoms/tampere is an important standard in the ICT4Peace field. The Convention was adopted in June 1998 by sixty governments and came into force in January 2005, giving privileges and protections to persons and facilities related to the provision of emergency telecommunications assistance. Although these rights are circumscribed by national sovereignty and are based on the assent of the national government, the Convention is a landmark agreement that should be implemented in all countries at risk from complex emergencies and natural disasters. Two organizations played key roles in the Tampere Convention; the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) and the International Telecommunications Union (ITU). Under the Convention, the Head of OCHA is designated as the Operational Coordinator with overall responsibility for international coordination, which includes: development and dissemination of model agreements and best practices; establishing an inventory of government focal points for all Convention matters, and telecommunications resources that could be made available for disaster mitigation and relief, and for the seeking the cooperation of other UN agencies, particularly ITU, to assist it in fulfilling the objectives of the Convention.  ITU http://www.itu.int plays an important role in promoting the Convention as the UN agency responsible for international telecommunications standards and policies, global radio frequency spectrum management, and telecommunications for development. ITU has undertaken a number of initiatives relevant to humanitarian relief operations. In terms of its internal operations, the ITU has adopted resolutions and recommendations on the provision and regulatory treatment of emergency telecommunications, and is assisting OCHA to implement the recently assigned international telephone country code for UN disaster relief activities.

 

 

UN Working Group on Emergency Telecommunications (WGET)

http://www.reliefweb.int/telecoms/intro/wget.html, provides an open forum to facilitate the use of telecommunications in the service of humanitarian assistance.

 

 

Crisis Response Executive Advisory Committee (CREATE)

http://www.itcm.org/approach/create.html has been created to facilitate structured cooperation between international organizations and ICT vendors. CREATE is organized by the Crisis Management Initiative and the Object Management Group http://www.omg.org, a non-profit consortium that produces and maintains computer industry specifications for interoperable enterprise applications.

 

 

Structured Humanitarian Assistance Reporting (SHARE)

http://www.proventionconsortium.org/files/share.pdf is an approach developed by the GIST, as a systematic methodology of organizing critical information so that it can be used more effectively, improving accuracy and verifiability by structuring and labeling data from a variety of sources.

 

 

Global Identifier Numbers (GLIDE)

http://www.glidenumber.net is an interesting initiative; a system of unique alphanumeric codes to identify natural disasters so that organizations collecting disaster information can easily share this information. Developed by the Centre for Research on Epidemiology of Disasters, the Asian Disaster Reduction Center and ReliefWeb, the system is being used by these organizations as well as other international institutions and national agencies.

 

 

Symposium on Best Practices in Humanitarian Information Exchange

http://www.reliefweb.int/symposium, organized by OCHA. Over two hundred participants, drawn from a range of international agencies, governments, donor organizations, and NGOs, developed a set of Operational Principles for Humanitarian Information Management and Exchange seven sets of best practice guidelines for ICT managers at headquarters and in the field.

 

 

United States Institute for Peace

http://www.usip.org has long been a leading force in the development of conflict and peace thinking, and have produced a wide range of books, papers, and conference reports that are accessible via its website. In addition, through its Virtual Diplomacy Initiative http://www.usip.org/virtualdiplomacy/index.html, USIP is playing a role in catalyzing the emerging discussions about ICT4Peace, especially with respect to issues of organizational coordination and technological interoperability.

 

 

Information Technology and Crisis Management Project (ITCM)

http://www.itcm.org has also become increasingly important. Led by Marti Ahtisaari, the former President of Finland, CMI is a prominent player in conflict prevention and management, including with respect to high-level mediation efforts.

 

 

Center of Excellence in Disaster Management and Humanitarian Assistance

http://www.coe-dmha.org is a project mandated by the US Congress to improve the coordination and integration of the world's response to natural disasters, humanitarian crises and peace operations.

 

  

OASIS Emergency Interoperability Member Section

http://www.oasis-emergency.org/

The OASIS Emergency Interoperability (EI) Member Section accelerates the development, adoption, application, and implementation of emergency interoperability and communications standards and related work. EI endeavors to represent and serve the needs of all constituents, from practitioners to technology providers and national, international and multinational oversight agencies.  The EI Member Section Steering Committee provides oversight and strategy for the creation of additional committees to advance standards for emergency and disaster management.

 

 

OASIS Emergency Management Technical Committee

http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/emergency/

The OASIS Emergency Management committee is enabling information exchange to advance incident preparedness and response to emergency situations.Its subcommittees include:

 

• Notification Methods and Messaging: Focused on the exchange of alerts, notifications, and incident related messages, which not only include various types of informational broadcast, but also electronic ICS (Incident Command System) form representation.
• Geospatial Information Systems: Working to ensure each TC-related specification has the proper geospatial capabilities to allow a GIS to leverage our formats. Additionally, the group is responsible for providing guidance for filling GIS-related gaps within the existing emergency and incident standards.
• Infrastructure Framework: Providing identification, research, and guidance on various standards, both developed in and external to the TC, as related to emergency and incident management with the purpose of ensuring elemental compatibility with current and future systems and communication mediums.
• # EM Adoption: - Supporting the adoption of standards to enable information exchange which advance incident preparedness and response to emergency situations. 

 

 

The OASIS Emergency Management committee has produced the following OASIS Standards:

 

• Common Alerting Protocol (CAP), a data interchange standard for alerting and event notification applications, currently in version 1.1. CAP functions both as a standalone protocol and as a payload for EDXL messages.  CAP OASIS Standard has also been endorsed as ITU-T Recommendation x.1303.
• Emergency Data Exchange Language (EDXL), a broad initiative to create an integrated framework for a wide range of emergency data exchange standards to support operations, logistics, planning and finance. The following extensions have been developed:
• EDXL Distribution Element (EDXL-DE)
• EDXL Hospital Availability Exchange (EDXL-HAVE)
• EDXL Resource Message (EDXL-RM)

 

These standards can also be adopted for use in post-conflict reconstruction and crisis management scenarios.

 

 

UN Spatial Data Infrastructure for Transport - Version 2.0

 

UNJLC was mandated by the UN Geographic Information Working Group and its inter-agency steering committee to act as custodian of logistics and transport data standards. To this end it has designed, implemented and maintains a package made of a database schema, an associated set of data collection forms and a global database for storing and serving logistics data. This package was first released in September 2007 (version 1.2). The UNJLC GIS unit is releasing the version 2.0 of the UN Spatial Data Infrastructure for Transport database schema (UNSDIT v2.0) building on half a year of user feedbacks and UNJLC operational lessons learned. Many thanks to all who have contributed their comments.

 

The most significant change has been the packaging of a “Light” subset of the Comprehensive UNSDIT package to better match responses to sudden-onset emergencies. The aim of the UNSDIT was to create a database structure with sufficient scope to accommodate for the generation of “a la carte” UNSDIT-compliant spatial databases and assessment forms. The “Light” version represents one such subset, but not the only possible selection of the attributes available in the “Comprehensive” version.

 

 

For more information and to download files related to the UNSDIT please click here.