With all the talk of common operating pictures (COPs), the public safety community is working hard to get lined up, sharing agreements established, standards implemented, and personnel trained. In at time that many feel that instant gratification takes too long, the goal of the COP is a a widely recognized prize for all that effort (and countless PowerPoint presentations as to how to get there and why). But the elements of a Picture should be up to the user. Police, fire, emergency management, public health all have different needs for maps and the incident management “pictures” each group uses should be designed for the use. It seems that something else forms the basis of a COP other than our desire to have one.
Thank goodness that many people involved in public safety GIS are mindful that the basic requirement of a COP is operable data. So why isn't there more discussion regarding COD (common operating data) along with the COP? At this time, the NFPA Technical Committee on Data Exchange is quietly continuing its work on developing a minimal standard to establish the COD for fire departments. Since the committee’s draft document is in process, there is no information publicly available at this time. The Committee will meet again in early 2011 and is expected shortly after to submit a draft the NFPA Standards Council for approval. After approval the document will be available for public comment. What all this means is that there’s still time for the COD discussion to surface among all public safety organizations, so when the document becomes available for public comment, you’ll be prepared to help the Committee finalize a list of data for the COD that we can use to create a COP that is real, useable, and truly common to incident management.
