PSTA releases initial industry and public safety recommendations on situational awareness

Consistent with the purpose and mission of the PSTA, the PSTA Board of Directors said it is pleased to release the Situational Awareness Technical Subcommittee report https://www.pstalliance.org/wp-content/uploads/PSTA-SA-Report.pdf which includes the initial PSTA recommendations for public safety and industry.

The Situational Awareness Subcommittee was established to recommend a common set of standard APIs and interface structures that will make the situational awareness construct for public safety users much easier to implement and integrate into existing systems.

PSTA’s recommendations are being made based on input and discussion among PSTA industry and public safety membership in subcommittee discussions that have been ongoing over the last year, and have been formulated leveraging this expertise as well as publicly available standards.

“We have worked hard to ensure that ongoing situational awareness becomes integrated into public safety operations now that public safety has come to expect high speed access to reliable and resilient public safety broadband,” said David Fritsche, PSTA Situational Awareness Subcommittee Chair and Secured Communications CTO.

The PSTA board has recommended a common language and symbology to ensure that all public safety users are able to consistently identify key landmarks and information across platforms. PSTA also recommends the use of open geospatial data standards, the use of the National Information Exchange Model (NIEM) in establishing a common naming convention schema across public safety, and the use of Project Open Data to address a common set of open standard metadata data sets and APIs for use by both federal and state agencies.

“Situational awareness incorporates multiple applications and platforms to share real time information for first responders and we need to ensure these systems are interoperable as they become embedded into every public safety organization,” added Anatoli Levine, PSTA Situational Awareness Subcommittee Member and Softil Director of Products and Standards.

As PSTA considers additional, relevant, information provided within the Situational Awareness Subcommittee, it will update and release any changes to its recommendations as necessary. The current report version will be posted on the PSTA website (https://www.pstalliance.org/technical-committees/subcommittee-report-and-comment-form/) and will be open and accessible to the public.