Data Gold for Homeland Protection

THE HOMELAND SECURITY INFRASTRUCTURE
PROTECTION PROGRAM REPRESENTS THE MOST
COMPREHENSIVE SET OF INFRASTRUCTURE
GEOSPATIAL INFORMATION EVER COMPILED.

by Peter A. Buxbaum

Despite its name, the program is not currently housed in the Department of Homeland Security, which was not formally established until a few months after HSIP got under way. Instead, it is under National Geospatial- Intelligence Agency (NGA), which was appointed the lead agency for HSIP and tasked to develop a comprehensive set of geospatial data on the country’s critical infrastructure that could be used for multiple homeland security purposes.

Because homeland security is a multifaceted challenge that runs across state and local governments as well as a large number of federal departments, however, HSIP may eventually be moved to DHS.

“HSIP was developed for the homeland defense community,” said Jim Neighbors, the deputy domestic preparedness branch chief at NGA. “But we manage the data inside of HSIP. We have the infrastructure available to perform that sort of mission.”

HSIP began in the summer of 2002 as a collaborative project between NGA and U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). A joint team set out to identify and prioritize potential terrorist targets and to identify the minimum geospatial data requirements to meet the needs of the evolving homeland security community. This inquiry resulted in a list of 103 data sets that NGA and USGS continue to use as the baseline geospatial requirements for HSIP.

DHS eventually joined HSIP as a key federal participant. Together with NGA and USGS, the HSIP team began acquiring what today totals over 340 data sets from government agencies at all levels as well as from commercial vendors in an effort to map the country’s critical infrastructures in 15 sectors. These include information and communications, banking and finance, water supply, emergency services, energy, public health, law enforcement and chemical manufacturing.

As HSIP developed, it went beyond collecting geospatial data to accumulate relevant related data on the infrastructure it was mapping, such as addresses and telephone numbers, key contacts and facility capacity.

HSIP GOLD

The result has become a product called HSIP Gold, a disc sent out annually to HSIP customers containing a common set of geospatial infrastructure data for all to use and apply in their homeland security missions. These users include dozens of DoD units as well as many other federal agencies, from the Census Bureau and the Department of Agriculture to the National Park Service and the U.S. Postal Service.

“HSIP Gold is like a master database for the federal homeland security community,” said Neighbors. “It enables homeland security planners to understand what vulnerable sites there are in their area and what facilities are available to them in the event an evacuation is called for. We just completed the 2008 version of HSIP Gold and included over 300 data sets. We have already started on 2009.”

Absent from Neighbors’ list of users are state and local government entities, and this represents a key gap in the development of HSIP to date. The licenses through which NGA has acquired HSIP data limit its dissemination, absent a national emergency, to federal entities. Acquiring a broader license would have been cost-prohibitive, Neighbors said. But HSIP is developing ways and means to bring state and local governments the key geospatial and related data it has acquired.

Another gap in HSIP is the absence of an enterprise solution, through which HSIP data would be accessible over a network via Web services and updated far more often than once a year. The technology is available to make this happen, however, and officials are working to bring this vision to fruition.

The baseline of HSIP activity is the collection of data. Many federal agencies collect geospatial data in the execution of their own missions. But these have proved valuable to HSIP’s infrastructure mapping efforts. State and local governments, for example, have provided HSIP with data on emergency management services, fire stations, houses of worship and hospitals. On the federal level, the USGS, Census Bureau, Coast Guard, Department of Transportation and Environmental Protection Agency, among others, have also contributed data.

“The data suppliers all provide us with standard GIS formatted data,” Neighbors said. “We integrate all of that into HSIP. The EPA stands out among federal data suppliers because of its mapping of water, electric and gas utilities, and chemical storage facilities.”

COMMERCIAL SOURCES

HSIP also relies on commercial data sources, including Dun & Bradstreet for data on businesses, Technigraphics for manufacturing and state governments, and Global Energy for the nation’s energy infrastructure.

Another commercial data vendor is NAVTEQ, which provides HSIP with data on the U.S. road infrastructure, commercial facilities and public venues. NAVTEQ is known for providing the underlying data for some online mapping applications, said Roy Kolstad, a company vice president.

“We provide 260 attributes per road segment,” Kolstad explained, “everything from street names, to the number of lanes and turn restrictions. In addition, we provide geocodes in the map for points of interest such as police stations and fire stations. Another data element of interest to HSIP is telecommunications data, such as which buildings are equipped with fiber and where cable is laid.”

NAVTEQ collects its geospatial data at the ground level, by having its employees drive the roads. “We have over 100 million touch points a day with our user community, so we have to get it right,” said Kolstad. “On any given day, one-third of our 3,000 employees are driving the roads to gather ‘ground truth’ information with their eyes and with video equipment. We keep the video in case we need to research something and want to come back to it.”

This type of data can be used for several homeland security purposes. “Let’s say you need to evacuate an area; you can use this data to figure out the best evacuation route,” said Kolstad. “Or let’s say there are some bad guys in the area. Law enforcement agencies can figure out where they are and how far they could have traveled in 15 minutes if they had jumped into a car.”

Another set of commercial data is supplied by Erdas, a company that provides geospatial data and software tools. The Erdas data focuses on vital services such as hospitals, ambulance services, nursing homes and child care centers. The data the company supplies is enriched with additional supplemental data that makes it all even more valuable for homeland security officials.

“In order to do a risk analysis for an infrastructure asset and to plan for contingencies, you have to know certain attributes about the asset, such as the size of the building, its capacity and the energy it consumes,” said Rick Driggers, HSIP director at the Department of Homeland Security. “The location alone doesn’t allow you to understand its potential impact in and around an incident area.”

That is where the data being compiled by Erdas on emergency facilities comes in. “It became apparent to us that the data available on these critical facilities was very poor,” said Angela Mealy, Erdas’ HSIP project director. “We set out to develop a database to add additional layers of information on these infrastructure assets in addition to location.”

“The data is compiled through a very comprehensive methodology,” added Eddie Pickle, who also works on HSIP at Erdas. “We get everything we can from any publicly available sources, such as directories and rosters, and then we contact each institution on the telephone so we can get 100 percent compliance. The information on a lot of institutions is not going to be current otherwise.”

That task is accomplished through a call center in the Kansas City, Mo., area, where teams of trained interviewers call institutions and go through a lengthy script to get the particulars on the capacity of the facility. In the case of hospitals, for example, they ask the names and telephone numbers of key contact personnel, the number of beds in the facility, and its burn and trauma capabilities.

In the case of schools, the data collected includes how many children are enrolled and whether they are present for before- or after-school activities. For nursing homes, the interviewers drill down to find out how many patients would have to be evacuated by ambulance.

“This data moves beyond a point on a map to confirm that the institution is still there and is able to provide things pertinent to emergency management,” said Pickle. “We also spend time on metadata, particularly the vintage of the data.”

“Data and metadata go hand in hand,” added Mealy. “Every time we update data, we provide information on its vintage. Without metadata it is difficult for users to understand what the data means.”

LOCAL LIMITS

While federal homeland security officials have full access to HSIP data, state and local officials do not. This is particularly problematic for a homeland security program, since the state and locals are the first responders in cases of homeland security incidents.

“Because of licensing restrictions, we would have to pay a lot more to release the commercial data sets to state and local governments,” said Neighbors. “We would also conflict with the vendors who are also marketing their data directly to state and local governments.”

The HSIP program has taken several approaches to better support state and local governments. The first is to create a new product called HSIP Freedom, which contains 190 data sets that HSIP is able to push out to the state and local agencies.

In addition, state and local governments are able to receive HSIP Gold data in cases of actual emergencies under existing licenses. “Whenever there is a declaration of a federal disaster, the license agreement for the commercial data sets areas allow distribution to state and local governments,” said Justin Sherin, a program manager at Booz Allen Hamilton, which supports DHS on HSIP.

“NGA has done a great job during disasters such as the California wildfires, the hurricanes in Texas and Florida, and Midwest flooding,” Sherin added. “Whenever disasters are declared, NGA works closely with emergency management and response organizations at the state and local levels.”

To help state and local entities, DHS has also developed an online tool called the Integrated Common Analytical Viewer (ICAV), a mapping application that allows state and local officials to view HSIP Gold data without actually taking possession of it.

“ICAV is an online tool available over a secure network that state and local governments can subscribe to,” explained Paul Christin, a homeland security specialist at ESRI. ESRI was involved in the development and support of ICAV. “ESRI did some development work in conjunction with DHS and provided some software coding, which built on some of our existing products,” said Christian. The ICAV tool is also loaded on an ESRI GIS server.

But ICAV is not a cure-all. “The state and local officials can only see the data, but can’t take it into their analytical tools,” explained DHS’s Driggers. “Different states use different geospatial technologies, such as Google, ESRI and others. It would benefit them to be able to take HSIP data and put into their own GIS tools to do own their own analyses.”

“When state and local agencies need to run a flood model or a water or power model, they would like to be able to plug in HSIP Gold data to run the model,” added Sherin.

NAVTEQ has proposed making its data available to state and local governments through HSIP Gold, according to Kolstad. “For planning purposes, they need the data for when bad things happen,” he said. NAVTEQ is still waiting for NGA to respond to the proposal.

HSIP could also better fulfill its mission if it were able to provide an enterprise solution that could be accessed online, using Web services instead of sending out data on annual discs, which are a relatively low-tech solution. Web services use open standards to facilitate the exchange of data among diverse applications.

“If we could use Web services, we could update the data much more often, at least quarterly,” said Neighbors. “At this point, we release data only once per year, and by the time we release it, it is already out of date. DVDs can also be expensive to make and track. Using Web services would be cheaper and faster.”

NAVTEQ’s Kolstad agreed that such a scheme would aid the HSIP mission. “The government will be able to provide more timely data,” he said. “We want to provide the government the freshest data possible. It is also important to get the right data to the right person at the right time. We do 1.7 million updates to our map every day around the world. From NAVTEQ’s standpoint it would be fantastic to share data electronically through machine-to-machine integration.”

“Serving up HSIP Gold as a Web service would be a huge leap,” added Driggers. “We have a plan and a roadmap to do that, and we will try to make it happen in 2009.”

DHS UMBRELLA

DHS also has a plan to bring HSIP under its umbrella. “DHS is responsible for infrastructure protection,” said Driggers. “A big part of our mission is to coordinate with and serve the needs of state and local governments. We couldn’t take HSIP on before because of our lack of maturity as a department. But we’ve reached the point where HSIP would be more effective if it were part of DHS. “We are in the process of putting together a plan to transition HSIP to DHS,” Driggers continued. “What this will do is to put a homeland security face on the program and it will unify HSIP with our other infrastructure protection efforts.”

Such a move will take some resources and leadership approvals, including review by the Office of Management and Budget, policy changes in the area of information sharing and congressional appropriations. “We hope to put an appropriation through Congress in the 2011 or 2012 timeframe,” said Driggers. “That is the closest we could influence the budgetary process in this area.”

Regardless of whether HSIP makes this transition, Driggers sees the program’s major future priorities as continuing improvement of data sets and establishing geocoding and data taxonomy standards. “These issues are not trivial when you are talking about such a diverse base of users,” Driggers said.

“HSIP represents the most comprehensive infrastructure data sets ever compiled,” he added. “What makes it so challenging is that the infrastructure landscape changes all the time.” ♦