EDXL Overview

The Emergency Data Exchange Language (EDXL) began in 2004 as a project of the Disaster Management eGov Initiative of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) as a means to enhance inter-agency emergency data communications. The standards which comprise or support EDXL include: (1) Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) for emergency alerts (see the CAP specification, and CAP schema); (2) Resource Messaging (RM) for issuing and handling requests for emergency resources (see the RM specification); (3) Hospital AVailability Exchange (HAVE) for communicating the status of a hospital and its resources (see the HAVE specification and HAVE examples zip file containing schemas, examples and draft white paper); and (4) Distribution Element (DE) for packaging and addressing emergency information (see DE specification with schema, and DE Basics white paper). (A new standard, Situation Reporting, is in the development process.) All of these standards can be found under the names CAP, EDXL-DE, EDXL-RM and EDXL-HAVE at the OASIS website: http://www.oasis-open.org. The goal of the EDXL initiative is to facilitate emergency information sharing and data exchange across the local, state, tribal, national and non-governmental organizations. The effort focuses on standardization of specific messages to facilitate emergency communication and coordination. Any technology vendor or organization can easily develop their XML-based messaging exchanges using these standards, leveraging their existing legacy information technology applications. For more background on EDXL, see http://xml.coverpages.org/edxl.html.