4-page Case Study - Posted 7/14/2008

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Strong Angel III

Disaster-Response Teams Use Open Sync to Speed Communication in Emergencies

When a catastrophe wipes out communication lines, how will emergency-response staff coordinate efforts to assess damage, aid victims, and speed the delivery of food and medical help? A group of more than 800 civilian and military volunteers met in San Diego in August 2006 to experiment with technologies for doing just that. During the gathering, called Strong Angel III, Microsoft provided an open synchronization technology called FeedSync for testing data-sharing in bandwidth-constrained environments. Using FeedSync, participants were able to exchange data across a variety of devices to speed decision-making and response. FeedSync has uses beyond disaster response to bridge divides between incompatible applications and devices. Microsoft has created a FeedSync Toolkit that any organization can use to make any application compatible with FeedSync.

Situation

The unimaginable happens: a global virus outbreak quarantines major cities and overwhelms government agencies and relief organizations. Within hours, a wave of cyber-terror attacks cuts off power, phones, and Internet access.

How would the world cope? In August 2006, more than 800 volunteers from a diverse group of organizations gathered in an abandoned fire department training facility in San Diego, California, to find out. The five-day demonstration was called Strong Angel III, the third in a series of civil-military demonstrations aimed at helping civilian and military organizations work together in a disaster-response situation.

Strong Angel III focused on simulating those aspects of post-disaster conditions that specifically affect communication, information-sharing, and coordination. Participants included government staffers, teams from the Pentagon, nonprofit humanitarian workers, and employees from several dozen technology companies, including Microsoft. “The value of Strong Angel is 70 percent in the social networks that are created,” says Dr. Eric Rasmussen, then a Commander within the Medical Corps of the U.S. Navy and organizer of the Strong Angel demonstrations. “What we do is try to bring people with disparate backgrounds together to foster collaboration and negotiation that focuses on solving problems.”

While the corporate world is rife with examples of teams that can’t communicate due to incompatible systems, in a disaster there’s no time for political bickering, finger-pointing, or organizational bias. Teams have to work together quickly to bridge divides for the common good. At the Strong Angel III simulation, a diverse set of people worked together in a stressful, time-compressed disaster-response scenario to resolve challenges not unlike those faced daily by teams in the business world. They had to figure out how to connect incompatible systems, coordinate roles and responsibilities across organizations, and remain effective offline.

Solution

About nine months before Strong Angel III, Microsoft had informally released FeedSync (originally known as Simple Sharing Extensions, or SSE), an extension to Real Simple Syndication (RSS) technologies that synchronizes heterogeneous data between two end points. While RSS allows users to subscribe to one-way data feeds, such as news stories or blogs, FeedSync allows for bidirectional subscription so that data sent by any application will appear on any other application in the communications mesh.

Distributed Data Mesh

At the time of Strong Angel III, Robert Kirkpatrick worked for Microsoft Humanitarian Systems, a group that develops Microsoft technology for use in humanitarian efforts, and was a Strong Angel III board member. He says that FeedSync provided a neutral, egalitarian means of collaboration. “We believed that a distributed, asynchronous mesh architecture at the application layer made more sense than anything else,” says Kirkpatrick. “We were interested in exploring the social consequences of having an information-sharing architecture that didn’t have a center. That was important, because in a catastrophe there is often no one in charge and no central hub.”

There is nothing else like FeedSync out there. It is the only viable way to bind applications together to let data flow. Dr. Eric Rasmussen Organizer of Strong Angel demonstrations

Strong Angel III participants indeed seized on FeedSync as a way to share information among various commercial geographic information systems, including Google Earth and Microsoft® Virtual Earth™ mapping software, that normally can’t communicate with one another. FeedSync also enabled interoperability between these mapping systems and Microsoft Office Groove® 3.1 (peer-to-peer collaboration software), and mapping software from ESRI and Intergraph. Such interoperability is invaluable for disaster-response coordinators who require real-time data feeds from a variety of locations. Using FeedSync, such feeds can display constantly changing or even conflicting data streams from multiple locations.

Instant Sharing of Diverse Data

During the event, participants successfully built a FeedSync data mesh that allowed two-way communication with anyone in the mesh. For example, a first responder in the field with a handheld computer could collect assessment data and transmit that information to disparate and otherwise incompatible end points in the mesh—an Office Groove workspace, a Web site, and a GIS application, for example. A car containing a mobile server computer and WiFi communications drove through the Strong Angel III site providing mobile Internet connectivity. Whenever the WiFi service came within range of field people collecting data, it would pick up their updates and automatically share them with everyone else in the FeedSync mesh.

“The significant thing that we demonstrated at Strong Angel III was the ability to collect data in the field, inject it into the FeedSync mesh, and see it instantly in wildly different applications,” Snoad says. “Conversely, updated data collected by ESRI satellites flowed all the way into handheld devices in the field. FeedSync crossed system and device boundaries and data collection methods.”

Since Strong Angel III, Microsoft has created a FeedSync Toolkit for enabling programs with FeedSync. Microsoft has created connectors for Microsoft Office Access and Microsoft SQL Server®, which allows connection to any Open Database Connectivity (ODBC) compliant database.

Benefits

Through the intense demonstration environment provided by Strong Angel III, team members from different organizations were able to use FeedSync to work together more effectively, improve individual impact in the field, and fuse data from various sources. This strengthened situational awareness and provided useful information for faster decision-making.

Lightweight Interoperability Using Standard Protocols

Using FeedSync, team members from many different organizations were able to communicate among different applications, devices, and operating systems to enable bidirectional data flow. Because FeedSync accessibility is broad, organizations don’t have to engage in complex development efforts to take advantage of it.

“There are many ways to integrate data, but a key benefit of FeedSync is that it is very quick to set up, even to the point of writing code from scratch in a few hours, as was done at Strong Angel III,” says Steven Lees, Principal Program Manager in Ray Ozzie’s (Chief Software Architect at Microsoft) Concept Development Team at Microsoft. “FeedSync is a brand new technology; the protocol is here, and the tools are steadily maturing and becoming more widely available. Anyone can quickly build tools to integrate new data sources.”

FeedSync has uses far beyond disaster response. Businesses can use it to lower the technical barriers in getting different kinds of computer devices and services to synchronize data. For example, FeedSync could be used to synchronize calendar data that resides in different systems such as Microsoft Office SharePoint® Server, Microsoft Exchange Server, and Windows® Live Calendar. FeedSync could also be used to merge a Microsoft Office Outlook® contact list with Microsoft Virtual Earth to visually see those contacts’ geographical locations. Embodied in Microsoft’s software and services, FeedSync is the underlying synchronization technology used for the Microsoft Sync Framework and the recently released Live Mesh platform.

“FeedSync provides a common foundation for any kind of data to be fluidly shared,” says Ted Okada, Director of Microsoft Humanitarian Systems. “It extends the Web 2.0 mashup concept to the desktop and gives users more control over their data.”

Data Exchange in a Dynamic, Collaborative Environment

At Strong Angel III, disaster-response teams from many different organizations were able to use FeedSync to easily communicate and collaborate across geographic, technical, and environmental boundaries. Mobile first responders were able to act immediately using instant alerts and notifications received from other participants in other locations. Getting fresh news feeds, especially visually, on digital maps, helped them coordinate faster and provide more effective response.

“The use of FeedSync was instrumental in teams being able to remain productive and effective throughout the simulation, with the ability to continue working from the field when offline or in a bandwidth-constrained environment,” Rasmussen says. “Because FeedSync is simple and open, we could very quickly bring new people, organizations, and data into the mesh. Plus, it enables more than just sending data back and forth. FeedSync includes versioning and conflict detection/resolution, which makes data exchange really rich, intelligent, and useful.”

Extensible and Agile for Future Needs

Carla Boyce participated in Strong Angel III as Chief of Plans for the Florida State Emergency Response Team. She saw the value and potential that FeedSync could provide to emergency operations in her state. “Interoperability is much more than whether or not my radio can talk to your radio,” she says. “Large-scale regional or catastrophic disasters cross jurisdictional boundaries, disciplines, and cultures. The lack of interoperability often hinders coordination and control of efforts, causes confusion when communicating location for delivery of critical supplies, and negatively impacts rescue operations. One of my primary goals as Florida’s Plans Chief was to get the right information to the right people at the right time to positively impact the outcome for the survivor. This group effort [Strong Angel III] between companies that normally compete was an amazing show of interoperability and exactly what I had been espousing as a result of lessons learned from the 2004 and 2005 tropical seasons.”

Florida is currently implementing the U.S. National Grid (USNG), an interoperable common geographic/coordinate language that can uniquely describe a single point anywhere in the nation. Its uniform grid pattern can also be used to describe areas of operations at a resolution compatible with ground-based search and rescue. “The underlying glue of FeedSync that made that possible is perhaps akin to the USNG,” Boyce says. “I believe that FeedSync is to interoperable information-sharing what the USNG is to interoperable geographic language. Both will be responsible for enhancing disaster operations and positively changing outcomes for victims.”
 
“There is nothing else like FeedSync out there. It is the only viable way to bind applications together to let data flow,” Rasmussen adds. “If we could build solutions that have an impact in this challenging environment [Strong Angel III], then these designs, approaches, and architectures will work anywhere. With FeedSync, you don’t need multi-billion-dollar custom solutions to solve data-sharing problems. A lot of commercial, off-the-shelf software can be snapped together like Legos to solve some really interesting problems if we can get everyone communicating.”

Microsoft and Interoperability
Microsoft delivers interoperability by design. Microsoft’s approach to interoperability helps customers focus on the issues most important to their business and operational needs, such as improving business processes, increasing productivity, connecting with customers, reducing costs, and collaborating with other organizations.

For more information about Microsoft and Interoperability, go to:
www.microsoft.com/interop

For More Information

For more information about Microsoft products and services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada Information Centre at (877) 568-2495. Customers who are deaf or hard-of-hearing can reach Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234 in the United States or (905) 568-9641 in Canada. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information using the World Wide Web, go to:
www.microsoft.com

For more information about Strong Angel III products and services, visit the Web site at:
www.strongangel3.net