Canada’s Solace Systems Oct. 5 said the Domestic Nuclear Detection Office (DNDO) of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has completed the initial prototype of a proposed messaging infrastructure architecture based on Solace’s Unified Messaging Platform, and that Solace’s hardware met or exceeded all interoperability requirements.
Performed by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA), the operational interoperability assessment simulated a real-world situational awareness scenario.
During the assessment, Solace’s products proved their ability to send and receive operationally dissimilar messages, transform messages in and out of numerous standard and proprietary formats, guarantee the delivery without loss or duplication of data, and stream messages in real-time onto multiple types of operational displays including Falcon View and Google Earth.
To effectively validate the distribution of emergency messages across multiple sensor networks and agencies, many vendors and organizations participated in the interoperability testing including Thermo Fisher Scientific, Honeywell [HON] , Kansas City Terrorism Early Warning (TEW) Group, Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center (SPAWAR) Pacific, Safe Environment Engineering, The MITRE Corporation, KL Technologies, Georgia Tech Research Institute and Google Earth.
“Our geospatially-aware, mission-critical messaging gives us an important element necessary to ultimately achieve an agency-wide information sharing architecture,” said Bob Dilonardo, CIO, Domestic Nuclear Detection Office. “The completion of this prototype is a significant step forward, enhancing our ability to use automated information sharing in order to ‘connect the dots’–the cornerstone of an effective defense against terrorism.”
Jeff Waters, scientist at SPAWAR Systems Center Pacific added, “This successful interoperability testbed installation is important for sharing mission-critical data across governmental and non-governmental agencies. The open standards-based messaging architecture improves operational awareness allowing key decision makers and field assets to make smarter, faster decisions during natural disasters and other emergency situations.”
Messages were sent through the system using many standard formats including the full suite of the OASIS Emergency Data Exchange Language (EDXL), Distribution Element (EDXL-DE), Hospital Availability Exchange (EDXL-HAVE), Resource Messaging (EDXL-RM), Common Alerting Protocol (CAP), Keyhole Markup Language (KML), Cursor on Target (CoT), National Information Exchange Model (NIEM N.25), and IEEE 1512.1 Traffic Incident Reports,
“Through this assessment, Solace has proven its ability to route real-time information between disparate organizations and technologies,” said Denis King, SVP of alliances at Solace Systems. “We look forward to continuing our work with key organizations and vendors to achieve DNDO’s goal of an interoperable federated government information bus for DNDO’s Global Nuclear Detection Architecture.”