EM Whitepaper Abstract Draft

["Jeff Waters" <jeff.waters@navy.mil>]

This paper proposes a modern emergency management framework for demonstration, education, and validation of effective and efficient management and sharing of emergency information to save lives through interoperability and standardization.  [1] Recently, HL7 and OASIS have collaborated on key standards, including the Tracking of Emergency Patients (TEP), Hospital Availability (HaVE) and the Common Alert Protocol (CAP), that offer a real opportunity to improve emergency information distribution to save lives, [2] if only there were a standard for effectively distributing this information using smart systems to those who need it based on their skills, roles and relationships. [3]There are two missing pieces to enable this distribution system. 
[4]The first missing piece is a standardized way to package and address the emergency information.  Fortunately, OASIS has just such a standard, the Distribution Element (DE).  The DE serves two primary purposes: (1) the DE allows an organization to wrap important pieces of emergency information into a single easy-to-distribute XML "package", and (2) the DE allows an organization to "address" the package in flexible ways to support intelligent routing, including specifying recipients by role, by geographic area, or by keywords.   
[5] The second missing piece is an emergency management framework consisting of [6] (1) key HL7, OASIS and other emergency standards; [7] (2) an open-source software library with a set of standardized APIs for developers to use in their systems to interact with these standards; and [8] (3) a sample reference implementation of an emergency management framework for demonstrating, educating, and validating the effective and efficient management and distribution of emergency information.   
[9] Fortunately, key emergency standards like TEP, HAVE and CAP exist, while initial sample open-source software libraries have been developed for standards like CAP, which could serve as models for extension to other standards.   OASIS has begun a sample reference implementation of their standards, while other organizations have open-source demonstration systems as well.  [10] As these standards have been developed,  major advances in rapid technology development and smart systems have occurred in the software development community, including DevOps, Containers, Microservices, Deep Learning, and Blockchains. Software developers are eager to utilize these advances in all areas, including emergency management.
[11] Now is the time to revisit the Distribution Element and enable the open-source initiative to provide the needed software libraries and reference implementation leveraging these software advances.  The authors recommend a collaborative, standards-based, open-source development process to include updating and modernizing the OASIS Distribution Element. The authors encourage industry, federal, state, and local government, academic and civilian participation and support as OASIS, HL7 and other standards organizations seek to lead this effort.
This white paper was produced and approved by the OASIS Emergency Management Technical Committee as a Committee Draft. It has not been reviewed and/or approved by the OASIS membership at-large.
What is missing from abstract: [12] Need, [13] Vision of World with Solution, [14] Discussion of ref impl needed  different data formats (json, thrift, avro, protobuf), storage solutions (sql, nosql, semantic, json-ld) , form builders + modern interface frameworks (react, angular)