Interoperability Framework:

Summary

Interoperability among government information systems is critical in dealing with natural disasters and winning the war on terrorism. The sharing of information between agency IT systems and among public jurisdictions historically has presented a tough challenge for government.

HLD believes the IF project will resolve common problems identified during recent events by improving coordination among civilian and military emergency response agencies by ensuring resource and information sharing.

What are the Objectives of Interoperability Framework?

The basic information-sharing needs of military and civilian responders are nearly identical: Both require getting the right information to the right people at the right time so they can take the right action.  To that end, IF’s goals are to facilitate interagency collaboration, speed joint decision-making, improve coordinated multi-agency response, and provide a testbed platform for a national architecture.  This will be achieved by taking advantage of existing programs, as well as current and emerging technologies, and supplementing them with a select group of congressionally and customer supported programs.  Directed by this national vision, a full complement of capabilities will be developed over the next several years.  Solutions developed for local or regionally oriented projects will incorporate the features and capabilities that provide compatibility with the PNS Interoperability Framework. 

The result is an initiative with the goal of: providing dual use (military and civilian) technologies; enhancing joint training and preparedness; improving interagency information sharing; and fostering trusted relationships in compliance with the National Incident Management System (NIMS).

IF will focus on the interoperability of systems and provide a common basis (semantics and syntax) for those elements that are, in fact, shared, combined, compared or aggregated.   Typically, not all information managed by two systems is shared. 

To resolve this issue, two primary objectives of the IF project have been identified.  They are:

1. Integration of existing systems and resources into a fully interoperable system of systems framework that supports flexible multi-agency coordination and collaboration.  
2. Providing a common standards-based framework that will allow agencies to use their existing command-and-control, sensor, and/or intelligence systems and still be interoperable with other agencies’ disparate systems.