Public Comment

[comment-form@oasis-open.org]

Comment from: mvandervlugt@skm.com.au

Name: Maurits van der Vlugt
Title: Senior Business Systems Consultant
Organization: Sinclair Knight Merz Pty Ltd
Regarding Specification: EDXL-DE

Dear EM TC Members,

I am responding to the EDXL-Dev1.0 specification, issued 14 February, on behalf of Sinclair Knight Merz (SKM), an international engineering consulting firm, based in Australia.

Amongst others, we are involved in feasibility studies for Emergency Management (EM) systems, dispatching, GIS and interoperability, for a wide range of clients. Currently, we are finalising a “Resource Tracking and Information Management Feasibility Study” for the Office of the Emergency Services Commissioner (OESC) in the state of Victoria.

In this light, we applaud the efforts by this TC and welcome the EDXL-Dev1.0 specification. However, we have some concerns about its potential impacts on interoperability between EM and spatial information systems (GIS):

1)	Through our experience in Australia with the OESC study and other projects such as the Spatial Interoperability Demonstration Project (SIDP: www.sidp.com.au), we know that (geo-)graphical display of EM-related information (such as resources, dispatches, incident reports) in multi-agency collaborative environments is critical.
2)	Geospatial display and analysis is most commonly done with Commercial off the Shelf tools, virtually all of which now can by default ingest Geographic Markup Language (GML) as the standard format for exchange of geographic features and their attributes. Hence, the inclusion of a (simple) GML structure in the TargetArea object of EDXL-DEv1.0 would be considered critical for easy adoption of the standard for EM interoperability purposes.
3)	By adopting GML as the method for location description, we would also enable the use of alternative spatial reference systems. In Australia, the national standard for instance is not GWS84, but GDA94. And I'm sure similar situations exist in other countries.
4)	Adopting GML would also mean the automatic inclusion of an altitude element (relevant for e.g. locating of aircraft) and temporal resource tracking.

In summary: effortless and seamless interoperability between EM and (COTS) GIS systems is an essential prerequisite for successful multi-agency EM collaboration. We strongly recommend that this TC seriously consider using the universally accepted standard of GML to represent geographic locations within the EDXL-DE specification to achieve this level of seamless and effortless interoperability.

Many thanks for your consideration, and wishing you all the best with your work,

Regards,

Maurits van der Vlugt
Senior Business Systems Consultant
Sinclair Knight Merz Pty Ltd
mvandervlugt@skm.com.au