[1] 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.
EDXL is advanced by the OASIS Emergency Management Technical Committee,[2] a group that was formed in 2003 and remains open to participation from organizations, agencies, and individuals from around the world.
Messages may be exchanged by specific recipients, by a geographic area, or by other codes such as incident and agency type (police, fire, etc.).
The primary purpose of the Distribution Element is to facilitate the routing of any properly formatted XML emergency message to recipients.
Subsequent meetings of a Standards Working Group developed detailed requirements and a draft specification for such a distribution element (DE).
Both organizations desired to develop an expanded family of data formats for exchanging operational information beyond warning.
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.
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.
Together EDXL-DE and EDXL-RM are intended to expedite all activities associated with resources needed to respond and adapt to emergency incidents.
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.
In particular, it will allow emergency dispatchers and managers to make sound logistics decisions - where to route victims, which hospitals have the ability to provide the needed service.
EDXL-SitRep will provide a standard format for sharing general information across the disparate systems of any public or private organization and Emergency Support Function (ESF), about a situation, incident or event and the operational picture of current and required response.
The purpose of EDXL-SitRep is to guide more effective preparation, response, management and recovery through seamless summary-level information-sharing before, during and after emergencies and disasters of any scale.
The CIQ TC's objective in producing their specification was for "global" identification and was discovered to include information not applicable to the Emergency Management Domain.
In light of this a profile was developed that maintained compliance with the original CIQ specification, but removed items not needed for EDXL.
The Geography Markup Language (GML) is the XML grammar defined by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) to express geographical features.
NIEM represents a collaborative partnership of agencies and organizations across all levels of government (federal, state, tribal, and local) and with private industry.
A related series of standards sponsored by the United States Department of Transportation and critical to emergency operations.