Revision as of 13:19, 13 April 2017

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NBCC Pilot of the Multi-Agency Situational Awareness System Sandbox

The NBCC Mobile First Technology initiative conducted a pilot project to experiment with providing real-time data feeds into Canada’s Multi-Agency Situational Awareness System (MASAS).

Research topics

situation awareness, CanOps, MASAS

MFTi completed a prototype that explores the use of the Multi-Agency Situational Awareness System (MASAS), which was developed and is managed by the Canadian Public Safety Operations Organization (CanOps). MASAS is a system that enables trusted information providers to federate their real-time data such that it can be easily filtered and visualized in real-time and geographically by registered data consumers. Real-time data types include public safety alerts, weather alerts, or any other communication of an emergent nature. Potential MASAS data consumers are generally organizations that have a public safety function for their clients. Organizations of this type include schools and post-secondary institutions, public safety organizations, and public event organizers. The act of federating and provide visualization of real-time data feeds is intended to enable the data consumers to maintain situation awareness.

MFTi's MASAS prototype posts and displays real-time data to the MASAS sandbox, a test facility operated by CanOps for organizations to develop, verify, and validate their data feeds. MFTi developed custom software and hardware in its Saint John Ideaspace to collect water level data in real-time and post them to MASAS via its Restful API. The resulting data feed can then be visualized in the MASAS browser.

Figure 1. This is an example screen shot of the MASAS browser, which enables the filtering and visualization of alerts.

Figure 2. The MFTi water level sensing apparatus used to generate data for the MASAS sandbox.

Figure 2. A screen shot of the real-time water level data feed for the MASAS sandbox created by MFTi.

Other information

• MFTi prototype demo video MPEG4
• About CanOps HTML
• About MASAS - Multi-Agency Situational Awareness System HTML

NBCC Team

• Rezk Bouras, Research Technician & NBCC Alumnus
• William McIver Jr., Ph.D., NSERC Industrial Research Chair in Mobile First Technology, Principal Investigator

Funders

• New Brunswick Innovation Foundation – Research Technician Initiative
• National Sciences and Engineering Research Council - Industrial Research Chair for Colleges

Project contact

William McIver Jr., Ph.D., NSERC Industrial Research Chair in Mobile First Technology, New Brunswick Community College

bill.mciver@nbcc.ca

Media inquiries