SBIR Phase II: FireScape: A Platform for On-Demand, Browser-Based Incident Command

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II aims to prove the feasibility of creating a web-based mapping and visualization application for end-users in wildland fire management communities as an extension to the results of the Phase I work. By partnering with strategic vendors, the project will expand our current application to offer not only advanced remote-sensing data products and customized reports, but on-site, real-time weather data, GPS tracking, and full data transfer and communications networks (including audio and video). The project aims to ultimately provide end-users access to a complete team of expert analysts and engineers to gather, merge, and analyze fire-related data products through satellite communications networking. Our experts will then consolidate and simplify all the available data into custom, real-time data reports with geospatial context and delivery it to end-users to expedite high-level decision making, which can save valuable assets and lives. The platform will be amenable to the networking, visualization and analysis of a great number of issues in not only the natural resources realm, but also homeland security, disaster relief, global monitoring, and hazard mitigation.The ability to quickly and efficiently collect, analyze, and share geospatial data (in particular, time-sensitive environmental data) across the World Wide Web is the cornerstone value proposition for this product. These combined abilities provide a critical and as-yet-unavailable tool for the fire management community. The project has both economic and humanistic benefits in that confinement strategies decided-on and applied during the early stages of fires can significantly reduce the cost of fire suppression by several millions of dollars. This increased information will also allow decisions to be made that keep firefighters as safe as possible. Additionally the project will offer advanced data products in formats designed specifically to address the aspects that influence these decisions. The combination of the hub solution and web browser interface as a flexible architecture, is based on open standards and therefore is agile, dynamically configurable, and interoperable holding significant value for applications such as natural disasters, pandemics, or homeland security. The overlay and visualization of that data will provide analyses of critical importance for decision and policy makers, as well as regular citizens, all seeking the best geospatial information possible and in a form they can use.