Unified Incident Command and Decision Support (UICDS) pilots take information sharing to the real world of incident management: A department of homeland security initiative for information sharing among commercial, government, academic, and volunteer tech

The Unified Incident Command and Decision Support (UICDS) middleware has moved through its architecture design phase, the development of a reference implementation, and now is engaged in a major pilot under the sponsorship of the Department of Homeland Security, Directorate of Science and Technology, Infrastructure and Geophysical Division. The current project will deploy pilots of the middleware in more than 20 states and approximately 100 pilot locations in order to assess the utility of the design for federal, state, and local agency use. UICDS enables ubiquitous information exchange among existing government and commercial incident management technologies for the purpose of creating one-to-many, incident-specific, agreement-based information sharing among a wide range of technologies used in incident management. This paper describes the current state of the architecture and reference implementation and offers an invitation to organization in both the government and private sectors to participate in pilots.