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NC4 Demonstrates Cross-Application Information Exchange Through the Unified Incident Command and Decision Support (UICDS) Project

EL SEGUNDO, Calif., Aug. 5 /PRNewswire/ -- NC4, Inc., the leader in Situational Readiness solutions for incident monitoring, crisis management, and secure collaboration, today announced participation as a first adopter in the Unified Incident Command and Decision Support (UICDS) program. UICDS is a "middleware foundation" that will enable a broad array of technology vendors to share emergency management information across jurisdictions. Based on design criteria taken from the National Response Framework, National Incident Management System and the Incident Command System, the UICDS prototype reference implementation of the national architecture for emergency information sharing was successfully demonstrated at the Virginia Emergency Operations Center in late April. UICDS is sponsored by the Science and Technology Directorate of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, and is being executed through a contract with prime contractor Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) (NYSE: SAI).

"The UICDS prototype demonstration illustrated how a wide variety of applications can share information through a diverse set of interfaces, data formats and networks using non-proprietary, open standards," said Chip Mahoney, SAIC Project Manager for UICDS. "The UICDS Architecture Specification accommodates the information exchanges emergency managers and responders need to help save lives, protect property, and minimize economic loss."

NC4's E Team application communicated key incident information with multiple systems during the UICDS demonstration using the Common Alerting Protocol (CAP). NC4's universal mapping client, Atlas, provided a common operational picture, pulling real-time information from E Team, ESA (NC4's near real-time external incident monitoring service), NOAA and other online data feeds. Atlas supports on-the-fly connectivity to many standard mapping formats, communicating directly to the UICDS core via WML and GeoRSS.

Hosted by Virginia Department of Emergency Management, the UICDS prototype implementation integrated information from 23 commercial, government and academic technology provider applications, demonstrating how this information is shared among applications and the jurisdictions they serve. The demonstration included six incident vignettes occurring in a simulated East Coast storm, with each vignette showing information sharing among five to seven applications currently in use by police, fire, emergency medical, emergency management, and other response organizations.

James W. Morentz, Ph.D., Director of UICDS Outreach, said, "Using the software development kit for the UICDS middleware and the National Information Exchange Model data exchange formats, these "first adopter" technology providers successfully demonstrated nearly one hundred real-time information exchanges. This demonstration points the way to a successful continuation of this government-sponsored, technology provider-driven information sharing across the full range of prevention, protection, response, and recovery."

About UICDS

UICDS is a middleware foundation that enables commercial and government incident management technologies to share information and support decisions for the National Response Framework and National Incident Management to prevent, protect, respond, and recover from natural, technological, and terrorist events. UICDS is sponsored by the Science and Technology Directorate of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, and is being executed through a contract with prime contractor Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC)[NYSE:SAI].

About NC4

NC4 delivers Situational Readiness solutions that empower government and businesses with accurate, timely and secure information to manage uncertainty. The NC4 product suite is used by emergency management, Federal agencies, financial services, law enforcement, as well as consulting, high-tech, insurance, aerospace and defense, oil and gas, and pharmaceutical and healthcare. NC4 takes a comprehensive and integrated approach to both crisis management and security, by providing: Situational Awareness both for External (ESA) and Internal (ISA) incident/event monitoring; Situational Response with our E Team application; and Secure Communication and Collaboration through our Extranet Secure Portals (ESP). For information about NC4, visit www.nc4.us or call toll-free, 1-877-624-4999.

SOURCE NC4