Emergency management through sensors of enterprise systems

Emergency responses must utilize all information sources available to the emergency operations centers. University campuses are overflowing with information sources due to their infrastructure of information technology (IT). While serving a student body of thousands and sometimes 10s of thousands, every operation in a university involves an IT enterprise system. While enterprise systems store and operate on vast amounts of data about the “happenings around campus”, they are still disparate data systems with no integrated view. Furthermore, most systems operate on and store same information about campus and people while using various data models appropriate to their operational needs. In this paper, we propose an industry standard that can enable treatment of data sources as enterprise sensors in an emergency sensor network towards an integrated emergency management portal. The standard is IF-MAP (interface for metadata access point). IF-MAP is a technology suite with a thin client to enable a publish/subscribe communications paradigm that can integrate disparate data sources for a facilitation of data exchange in speeding emergency decision processes. We have implemented integration of sensor data feeds from the card access system, video feeds, and general facilities information at the University of Houston.