WHISPER - Service Integrated Incident Management System

This paper presents a cohesive summary of existing emergency response systems. We investigate and integrate principles, theories, and practices from four diverse, yet related, fields of knowledge with respect to information representation and decision support capability requirements for emergency planning and response (EPR) systems. This enables the cooperation between constituent agencies (e.g., fire, police and medical) and surrounding municipalities which operate using assorted decision support protocols, system architectures, networking strategies and along different levels of data security needs. Based upon our investigation, we have built a service architectural framework for providing and disseminating an integrated platform of knowledge capable of being used as intelligent interconnects between distributed EPR systems. Such a framework can support affordable integration for municipalities of all sizes, in particular smaller municipalities that often cannot afford costly off-the-shelf software solutions consisting of proprietary logic and requiring extensive customization and support cost. We also present a prototype web service based implementation and summarize the limitations of such an approach. Index: Emergency response system, emergency planning and response, emergency management, decision support, web service.