On November 3rd, 2008, two new standards for emergency data exchange were announced by OASIS - an EDXL Resource Messaging standard (EDXL-RM) and an EDXL Hospital AVailability Exchange (EDXL-HAVE) standard. The standardization of emergency management message exchanges improves the ease of adoption and integration of technologies to help emergency response organizations more efficiently respond to large scale disasters. Service Oriented Architectures and standards based message exchanges are key to leveraging computing automation for emergency management situational awareness and common operating pictures.

If you are looking for a good place to trek into an SOA ecosystem and get your feet wet, emergency management is a good place to start. YourGlobalGrid.com is a project in progress demonstrating where SOA Reference Architectures and standards lay some rubber on the technology highway. Better still, YourGlobalGrid.com is based on a free and open source technology highway so anyone can do it.

YourGlobalGrid.com was the first web site to make example web service interfaces available to the public for both the EDXL-RM and the EDXL-HAVE. While interfaces for message exchange standards can come in many forms, web services are likely to be a prominent means of exchanging emergency management messages because of the many standards like reliable messaging and security that have evolved around web services.

To see tutorial webcasts showing how to use YourGlobalGrid.com EDXL web services see http://www.YourGlobalGrid.com/?tab=support .

Danny Thornton