The Emergency Data Exchange Language (EDXL) is a suite of XML-based messaging standards that facilitate emergency information sharing between government entities and the full range of emergency-related organizations. EDXL standardizes messaging formats for communications between these parties. EDXL was developed as a royalty-free standard by the OASIS International Open Standards Consortium.
EDXL was designed to enable information about life-saving resources to be shared across local, state, tribal, national and non-governmental organizations. Implementation of EDXL standards aims to improve the speed and quality of coordinated response activities by allowing the exchange of information in real time.
Background EDXL is advanced by the OASIS Emergency Management Technical Committee, a group that was formed in 2003 and remains open to participation from organizations, agencies, and individuals from around the world. EDXL is based on detailed requirements and draft specifications provided to OASIS by emergency practitioners, with support from the Emergency Interoperability Consortium, through a project sponsored by the United States Department of Homeland Security’s Disaster Management E-Gov Initiative.
EDXL-DE was approved as an OASIS Standard in 2006; EDXL-RM and –HAVE were approved as OASIS Standards in 2008.
Implementation of EDXL is promoted by the OASIS Emergency Management Adoption Committee, which was formed in 2009.
Components The EDXL suite comprises a number of individual standards. Each standard is elaborated in the following sub-sections:
EDXL-DE (Distribution Element) Overview EDXL-DE (Distribution Element) OASIS Standard, an XML-based header or wrapper that provides flexible message-distribution for emergency information systems’ data sharing. Messages may be exchanged by specific recipients, by a geographic area, or by other codes such as incident and agency type (police, fire, etc.). Any content payload can be distributed using the DE, not just EDXL messages.
Purpose The primary purpose of the Distribution Element is to facilitate the routing of any properly formatted XML emergency message to recipients. The Distribution Element may be thought of as a "container". It provides the information to route "payload" message sets (such as Alerts or Resource Messages), by including key routing information such as distribution type, geography, incident, and sender/recipient IDs.
Conformance Although there is an XML schema for EDXL-DE, there are some "business rules" or conformance rules that the developer must comply to in order to be considered conformant / compliant to the EDXL-DE Standard. Here are a list of the compliance rules from the EDXL-DE standard document:
Element Name Schema Data Type Restriction Comments Notes senderID string In the form actor@domain-name In the format of an email address: <string w/o @>'@'<valid domain>
Should be valid domain - In the "format" of an email; can't have commas dateTimeSent dateTime The Date Time combination must include the offset time for time zone. language string Valid language values are supplied in the ISO standard [RFC3066] can be en-US or EN or both in the form char OR char'-'char distributionReference string Comma delimited string consisting of a valid dist. ID, senderID, and dateTimeSent circle string In the form lat,lon<space>radius Lat/lon is WGS84. Radius is in km polygon string Must be a valid polygon. Must be in the form list{lat,lon<space>} No trailing space on the last point polygon string Ring Orientation Follow the "Left Hand Rule" for exterior linear ring orientation? Not intersecting itself country string Two character ISO 3166-1 country code Two characters subdivision string Iso3166-1’-‘char subdivision code Should be in the form char’-‘char[1-3] Two characters '-' 1-3 Characters locCodeUN string Iso3166-1’-‘UNLOCCODE Should be in the form char’-‘char 5 characters alphanumeric digest string Result of SHA-1 hash on payload data So the result of the hash is just 160 bits. String must be a Hexadecimal representation of the hash result. keyXMLContent string Must be explicitly namespaced as defined in the closing contentobject block It is correct that the XML data itself need to be within a separate namespace (not the entire content object). keyXMLContent must be well-formed embeddedXMLContent Example string Must be explicitly namespaced as defined in the closing contentobject block It is correct that the XML data itself need to be within a separate namespace (not the entire content object). embeddedXMLContent must be well-formed DistributionID string no commas
Background The Disaster Management eGov Initiative of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) determined in 2004 to launch a project to develop interagency emergency data communications standards. It called together a group of national emergency response practitioner leaders and sought their guidance on requirements for such standards. In June, 2004 the first such meeting identified the need for a common distribution element for all emergency messages. Subsequent meetings of a Standards Working Group developed detailed requirements and a draft specification for such a distribution element (DE). During the same period the DM Initiative was forming a partnership with industry members of the Emergency Interoperability Consortium (EIC) to cooperate in the development of emergency standards. EIC had been a leading sponsor of the Common Alerting Protocol (CAP). Both organizations desired to develop an expanded family of data formats for exchanging operational information beyond warning. EIC members participated in the development of the DE, and in the broader design of the design of a process for the development of additional standards. This was named Emergency Data Exchange Language (EDXL). The goal of the EDXL project is to facilitate emergency information sharing and data exchange across the local, state, tribal, national and non-governmental organizations of different professions that provide emergency response and management services. EDXL will accomplish this goal by focusing on the standardization of specific messages (messaging interfaces) to facilitate emergency communication and coordination particularly when more than one profession is involved. It is not just an "emergency management" domain exercise. It is a national effort including a diverse and representative group of local, state and federal emergency response organizations and professionals, following a multi-step process. Just as a data-focused effort targets shared data elements, the EDXL process looks for shared message needs, which are common across a broad number of organizations. The objective is to rapidly deliver implementable standard messages, in an incremental fashion, directly to emergency response agencies in the trenches, providing seamless communication and coordination supporting each particular process. The effort first addresses the most urgent needs and proceeds to subsequent message sets in a prioritized fashion. The goal is to incrementally develop and deliver standards. EDXL is intended as a suite of emergency data message types including resource queries and requests, situation status, message routing instructions and the like, needed in the context of cross-disciplinary, cross-jurisdictional communications related to emergency response. The priorities and requirements are created by the DM EDXL Standards Working Group (SWG) which is a formalized group of emergency response practitioners, technical experts, and industry. The draft DE specification was trialed by a number of EIC members starting in October, 2004. In November, 2004, EIC formally submitted the draft to the OASIS Emergency Management Technical Committee for standardization.
EDXL-RM (Resource Messaging) Overview EDXL-RM (Resource Message) OASIS Standard, which describes a suite of standard messages for sharing data among information systems that coordinate requests for emergency equipment, supplies, and people.
Purpose The primary purpose of the Emergency Data Exchange Language Resource Messaging (EDXL-RM) Specification is to provide a set of standard formats for XML emergency response messages. These Resource Messages are specifically designed as payloads of Emergency Data Exchange Language Distribution Element- (EDXL-DE)-routed messages. Together EDXL-DE and EDXL-RM are intended to expedite all activities associated with resources needed to respond and adapt to emergency incidents. The Distribution Element may be thought of as a "container". It provides the information to route "payload" message sets (such as Alerts or Resource Messages), by including key routing information such as distribution type, geography, incident, and sender/recipient IDs. The Resource Message is constrained to the set of Resource Message Types contained in this specification. The Resource Message is intended to be the payload or one of the payloads of the Distribution Element which contains it.
History Disaster Management (DM) is a communications program in the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Office for Interoperability and Compatibility (OIC) and managed by the Science and Technology (S&T) Directorate. The program was initiated as one of the President’s e-government initiatives. DM’s mission is to serve as the program within the Federal Government to help local, tribal, state, and federal public safety and emergency response agencies improve public safety response through more effective and efficient interoperable data sharing. The DHS DM program sponsors a Practitioner Steering Group (PSG). The DM Practitioner Steering Group (PSG) governance was formalized following publication of the EDXL Distribution Element. It plays a key role in the direction, prioritization, definition, and execution of the DHS-DM program. The group is composed of representatives of major emergency response associations, setting priorities and providing recommendations regarding messaging standards development as well as the other facets of the DM program. The PSG specified messaging standards-based systems interoperability as the top priority for the DHS Disaster Management program. The EDXL Resource Messaging Specification effort was identified as the top priority standard by this group following the EDXL-DE. The requirements and specification effort was initiated by this group in partnership with industry members of the Emergency Interoperability Consortium (EIC) in a Standards Working Group (SWG). That group developed a draft specification which was submitted to the OASIS Emergency Management Technical Committee to begin work on this EDXL-RM specification. The process remained the same as with the EDXL-DE specification with the exception that the Technical Committee requested that the initial candidate specification submitted by the expert group be recast as a formal Requirements Document according to a template that the Technical Committee provided to the expert group. The candidate specification was then resubmitted along with this requested requirements document.
EDXL-HAVE (Hospital Availability Exchange) Overview EDXL-HAVE (Hospital Availability Exchange) OASIS Standard, which allows a hospital's status, services, and resources (including bed capacity, emergency department status, and available service coverage) to be communicated.
Purpose EDXL-HAVE specifies an XML document format that allows the communication of the status of a hospital, its services, and its resources. These include bed capacity and availability, emergency department status, available service coverage, and the status of a hospital’s facility and operations.
History