EDXL

The Emergency Data Exchange Language (EDXL) is a suite of XML-based messaging standards that facilitate emergency information sharing between government entities and the full range of emergency-related organizations. EDXL standardizes messaging formats for communications between these parties. EDXL was developed as a royalty-free standard by the OASIS International Open Standards Consortium.

EDXL was designed to enable information about life-saving resources to be shared across local, state, tribal, national and non-governmental organizations. Implementation of EDXL standards aims to improve the speed and quality of coordinated response activities by allowing the exchange of information in real time.

EDXL is advanced by the OASIS Emergency Management Technical Committee, a group that was formed in 2003 and remains open to participation from organizations, agencies, and individuals from around the world. EDXL is based on detailed requirements and draft specifications provided to OASIS by emergency practitioners, with support from the Emergency Interoperability Consortium, through a project sponsored by the United States Department of Homeland Security’s Disaster Management E-Gov Initiative.

EDXL-DE was approved as an OASIS Standard in 2006; EDXL-RM and –HAVE were approved as OASIS Standards in 2008.

Implementation of EDXL is promoted by the OASIS Emergency Management Adoption Committee, which was formed in 2009.

The EDXL suite comprises a number of individual standards. Each standard is elaborated in the following sub-sections:

EDXL-DE (Distribution Element) OASIS Standard,an XML-based header or wrapper that provides flexible message-distribution for emergency information systems’ data sharing. Messages may be exchanged by specific recipients, by a geographic area, or by other codes such as incident and agency type (police, fire, etc.). Any content payload can be distributed using the DE, not just EDXL messages.

The primary purpose of the Distribution Element is to facilitate the routing of any properly formatted XML emergency message to recipients. The Distribution Element may be thought of as a "container". It provides the information to route "payload" message sets (such as Alerts or Resource Messages), by including key routing information such as distribution type, geography, incident, and sender/recipient IDs.

Although there is an XML schema for EDXL-DE, there are some "business rules" or conformance rules that the developer must comply to in order to be considered conformant / compliant to the EDXL-DE Standard. Here are a list of the compliance rules from the EDXL-DE standard document:

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