Linking the Canadian Geospatial Data Infrastructure to a Common Architecture for Situational Awareness

This project was launched to investigate and develop new information architectural approaches to solving serious interoperability problems in many national systems that deal with situational awareness.

The CASA Project was started in 1999 with co-funding by GeoConnections and Department of National Defence . This project embarked on defining a common architecture that can be used for situation management in the domains of defence, disaster management, emergency management, security and law enforcement. The main principle behind CASA is to engage the community of stakeholders (government, academia, private sector) in an open forum so that an architecture can be designed that fosters the exchange of information and interoperability through open interfaces. This approach attempts to avoid stove-piped, proprietary solutions .

Activities such as earthquake disaster preparation, emergency services dispatch, surveillance of marine vessels, drug interdiction, and monitoring of terrorist threats to critical infrastructures requires the discovery, tasking, access, processing, exploitation and dissemination of a wide range of information surrounding single and multiple situations. This information is used to plan for, predict, detect, and track situations and to dispatch and manage resources directed at the situation. A common architecture for managing these information critical situations provides a means for many agencies and information sources to interoperate, collaborate and share information and software components
 
Contact: Mike Power (mpower@firstmark.ca) , CASA Project Manager