Canada’s Model for Exchanging Critical Infrastructure Data Improves Cooperation
By Deb Nerud
Paula Rojas and Philip Dawe, both of GeoConnections, provided an overview March 11 on the initiative in Canada to support public safety and emergency response decision makers in preparation for unexpected events.
“Many emergency managers require the need to share information in an efficient manner, and to integrate it in order to support decision making,” Rojas said. “This may require information that they do not own or manage.”
She described barriers to cooperation such as restrictive data pricing policies of government, duplication of data sets, lack of standards, lack of access, and data which is not available through the internet or not in digital format.
Canada’s approach to breaking down these barriers was to set up a foundation for the interaction to take place. This resulted in the formation of Geospatial Information Data Infrastructure (CGDI). “The CGDI provides a standards-based foundation of geographic information and facilitates interoperable information sharing for decision makers,” said Rojas. “GeoConnections is funded by the Canadian government to continue to evolve and develop the CGDI. In general, spatial data infrastructure enables the sharing of interoperable spatially correlated data via standards, data service registries, toolkits, technologies, collaboration, and partnerships.”
Dawe added, “We wanted to get emergency management individuals’ input on what the priorities are and identify critical infrastructure.”
“We are looking at emergency management as something that exhausts local level resources,” said Dawe. “There are 6,000 to 8,000 systems across the country that people are already using, so one priority is working on interfaces between the existing systems.”
Rojas said that infrastructure data is a primary focus and ten sectors concerned with infrastructure have been identified such as energy and utilities, communication, finance, food, manufacturing, healthcare, transportation and more. “This is not about creating a centralized warehouse, but developing a common data model for strategic information needs of the emergency management community,” he said.
Identifying a champion to establish a National Infrastructure Community of Practice with representatives from various levels of government and the private sector and implementing infrastructure data exchange test-beds and pilot projects to validate the data model, are among the 15 recommendations from GeoConnections. “We would like to see a registry or portal of practice established to facilitate collaboration and information exchange within the [users community] also,” Rojas said.
