Sharing emergency information between Emergency Control Centres: the Project REACT

Every year, thousands of emergency call-centres in the EU receive some 200million calls from citizens in distress. In response to them, Public Safety Answering Points(PSAPs) dispatch ambulances, fire-fighter teams or police squads to help the callers. InEurope, response to the calls and interaction between different agencies are oftenuncoordinated. This holds true also between different departments of the same: informationsharing between them is still typically based on faxes and phone calls. The EuropeanProject REACT (Reaction to Emergency Alerts using voice and Clustering Technologies)aims at creating a seamless way to allow Command and Control center of differentagencies (or of the same agency in different locations) to share data in electronic format.Key technical drivers of the project are the CAP protocol, the TSO data dictionary, adistributed web service based architecture and the AtomPub protocol. REACT started circaone year ago and has currently completed the design phase.