DS CWA 15931-1:2009

Disaster and emergency management - Shared situation awareness - Part 1: Message structure

Scope

The context of this CEN Workshop Agreement (CWA) is disaster and emergency management, and it aims to assist organizations involved by providing a message structure for the transfer of information between computer based systems in such a way that it can be reliably decoded. This is done by encoding the information in an XML Schema. The companion CWA-Part2 provides a system of terms relating to disasters and emergencies and their encoding. Many of the XML fields are required to use a term from the companion CWA-Part2, rather than free text, so that the information is well defined, and can be automatically translated into language appropriate to the user.

The companion CWA-Part2 is:
Disaster and emergency management - Shared situation awareness - codes for the message structure.

This message structure described in the present CWA-Part1 is named the Tactical Situation Object (TSO).

The TSO defines an information structure to record a view of a situation as seen by a particular observer at a particular time. It is used to transfer this view to another observer. Here an observer can range through a machine such as transponder, a human with a hand held device, to a complex computer system providing command, control and planning functions. This information contributes to the situational awareness of the various parties, that is, their awareness of the current state of the world, the actions of the agents involved in the crisis and the plans of the responding organizations. The message can be used peer-to-peer for observers at the same level of the command hierarchy, or used to send information up and down the hierarchy.