Caught with your plans down? New GTVC tool could help

A new collaborative mapping tool is giving emergency managers a better way to coordinate incident planning in real time.

Kirk Pennywitt is a senior research engineer with GTRI.

The Geographic Tool for Visualization and Collaboration, developed by the Georgia Tech Research Institute, tracks the location and availability of resources such as hospitals, transportation equipment and water during emergencies.

"GTVC enables an easy, secure mechanism for sharing geographically oriented information regarding emergency response planning and response," said Kirk Pennywitt, a senior research engineer in GTRI’s Information Technology and Telecommunications Laboratory.

Pennywitt told Homeland1 that the GTVC kit provides tools that let managers easily annotate maps of an area of interest using Department of Homeland Security–compliant symbology. It provides messaging and incident tracking that supply detailed text information about an event, and the system interfaces with resource databases and electronic alert systems to facilitate the search for and display of the closest resources.

"GTVC is unique in providing a Java-based client server real-time collaborative view of an exercise or live situation," Pennywitt said.

Currently, GTVC is used to support the Georgia Office of Homeland Security and first responders in Georgia and is commercially licensed as a component of the National Emergency Management Network. It has been adopted by the Florida Department of Emergency Management, as well as other state and county agencies throughout the U.S.

Pennywitt said GTVC:

• allows a variety of map and imagery types to be used from multiple map servers, including user provided products; 
• automatically records all actions in a relational database so that a complete audit trail of all activities in a session is maintained; and
• provides the ability to graphically play back any portion of a session from any user's point of view, so that after-action reporting and analysis can easily be performed.

"It was deliberately designed with ease of use in mind and does not require any GIS expertise to effectively utilize its mapping capabilities," he said. GTVC is open architecture, meaning that it can be easily extended via plug in modules.