Grandpa Ham – Grandpa Can do IT!

I have finally updated my resume to account for the work I have been doing for FEMA since October. Yes I am back to the Disaster Management Program except that I am working for the Program Office instead of on the development contract. A lot of the work is similar and I am glad I can participate. The mission is important. I am now under contract through Eye Street Software Corporation to provide systems engineering support to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). Duties include:

• Requirements development and assessment of steps needed to decouple the current Disaster Management Interoperability Services (DMIS) capability into two separate and cooperative capabilities for FEMA. The Disaster Management – Open Platform for Emergency Networks (DM-OPEN) will be a stand alone, standards based Enterprise Service Bus for data communications interoperability across the full spectrum of responder organizations at the Federal, State, Local and Tribal levels. The Current DMIS Toolset will be transformed from its current client server implementation into a web-based framework (the DM-Framework) that houses access to a user-configurable set of emergency management applications.
• Systems Engineering Life Cycle Documentation and Federal Enterprise Architecture compliance management for the DM PMO.
• Response to stakeholder inquiries concerning DM-OPEN, the DM-Framework, and related data standards.
• Assistance to programmers connecting to DM-OPEN Interfaces.
• Liaison with the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS), as well as other standards organizations and Federal programs that affect, or are affected by, the Disaster Management Program.

The new poller/poster for FEMA’s Open Platform for Emergency Networks is now on Source Forge. Lee Tincher from Evolution Technologies reworked some of my old code to make in work directly with both Oracle and MySQL databases. I must admit that his solution is much more robust than my original test code. On the other hand, I did write the foundation connection code. :–) Let’s hope we get a lot of interest. This could make emergency alert sharing in a non-proprietary environment actually work. Even better, lets make it work in a multi-proprietary environment using OASIS EDXL Standards for communication through a level playing field Government supplied middleware infrastructure. This was my dream when I worked on Disaster Management. Maybe it can actually happen.

Spent the last couple of weeks helping to design a single place in the logical data structure for all aspects of information a DMV might want to consider. The Customer Information Quality Specification from OASIS provided the basic structure, but a lot of new material is needed to make it work. The key is to allocate the data to the correct place in a hierarchy of Party Types and to the roles that are “playable” by each type. It is a thought provoking exercise. It also make you well aware of the potential data quality pitfalls of mis-allocating data to a less advantageous entity within the overall data architecture. (Note to readers: this is just the beginning ov some very cool stuff.)

Lee Tincher from Evolution Technologies is building some new open source connection code for DM-OPEN that adds to my previous test code. This addition will include database connection code for oracle and MySQL that will let developers retrieve Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) alerts from DM-OPEN and directly put them into a relational database for further processing. We plan to put the updated code up on the EM Forum site for others to use as desired. Cool stuff. Eventually we plan to add to this code so that it handles Emergency Data Exchange Language (EDXL) Distribution Element (DE), Resource Messaging (RM), and Hospital AVailability Exchange (HAVE). Emergency Managers every where – While I am of some assistance, Lee is doing real work that supports you! I am sure that he will appreciate your gratitude and support.

The new OASIS Emergency Management Resource Message is about to be released for Public Comment.  I will link it here just as soon as it is available.  It has been a lot of work, but is finally in very good form.  Schemas, message examples, and complete specification document will soon be available.

We figured it out at the Emergency Management Technical Committee Messaging subcommittee meeting yesterday.   There was an error in the CIQ schema.  We have submitted a fix to the the OASIS CIQ committee chairman.  All is good. Our Resource Messaging schemas work. Yea!!!

Folks,

The following is a geek post on XML Schema, Customer Information Quality (CIQ), and Microsoft Visual Studio. I am blogging it here so I can easily refer to it in e-mails or future posts.

I am trying to convert some Resource Messaging examples to CIQ 3.0 for our Resource Messaging Specification. It was working well. I figured out most of the differences and was making some progress when I suddenly got unexpected “Object Reference not set to an instance of an object” and Unhandled “System.NullReferenceException in XML Editor” errors in MS Studio 2005.

It occurred when changing element names from xal:Name to xal:NameElement for either xalAdministrativeArea or xal:Locality.
Interestingly, it does not happen when changing xal:Name to xal:NameElement for xal:Country.

Weird??

Not trusting the expensive Microsoft product, I returned to my free-ware X-Ray from Architag International. It detected what it believes to be an error in the xAL schema. The following is the text of the error message:

Invalid content type by extension, extension is not allowed by Base Type: ‘{urn:oasis:name:ciq:xal:3 }NameType’ Derived Type.

Schema Error Location /schema{1}/complexType[position()=1 @name= ‘AddressType’]/sequence[1]/element[position() = 4 @name = “Locality”/complexType[1]/sequence[1]/element[position0 = 1 @name = [‘NameElement’]/complexType[1]/complexContent[1]/extension[1]

Perhaps that is why Visual studio is choking. It is certainly in the same place (xal:Locality NameElement).

Question: Can anyone verify the authenticity of the error?

Spent the morning today reviewing the OASIS Customer Information Quality (CIQ) specification. Good work. CIQ is set of XML Schemas designed manage names, addresses, and locations related to organizations and individuals across the globe or in your back yard. For CIQ, at least, “flexible structure” is not an oxymoron. I am researching this for the OASIS Emergency management Technical Committee, but it has implications for the Virginia DMV as well. A basic structure for accessing the “360 view.” Good stuff. Here is the link to the OASIS download page.

Back to schema work for Christmas holiday.  Doing the formal schema to be part of the Emergency Management Technical Committee draft Resource Messaging Standard.

A Reminder for our Committee and other SDO’s of all Kinds (with apologies to Ogden Nash)

OASIS creates
Standards of choice.
Standards design
Where we have a voice.

PLEASE keep it simple
For programmer use.
Complication’s no more
Than programmer abuse.

Too much hoo hah
And talk of what’s “critical”
Sounds to most programmers
Like BS political.

How do we build it?
We just want to know.
Make it seem easy.
Adoption will grow.

Use some big words
To describe simple things,
And watch us ignore you.
You won’t even get pings.

If we don’t understand
We will not comply,
And use of your standards
Will shrivel and die.

So, do not confuse us.
Be explicit, direct,
Or your “stuff” and ours
Will not intersect.

We’ll just ignore you
And be on our way.
We will build what WE need
And YOU can “have a nice day.”