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Purpose
of iRWIn
iRWIn (Integrated Reporting of Wildland-Fire Information) is
an NWCG sponsored project to develop an “end–to–end”
fire reporting capability that provides an integrated and coordinated
process for collecting and reporting incident/event data.
In today’s environment, data is input into many unique
systems. Often, basic fire information like location, size,
environmental conditions, and resources are repeatedly input
into these stand-alone systems as a foundation for their capabilities.
As conditions change over the life of an incident, more timely
and accurate information is input into operational systems,
while the original, outdated data remains in the supporting
systems.
An example is location of a fire (latitude/longitude). A 2008
interagency efficiency report identified that an interagency
dispatcher may have to enter this piece of data in up to 26
different systems. Once they have received what they need from
each system, they do not go back and update each system when
better info becomes available.
When questions arise about individual fires or national views,
there are often multiple answers depending upon where one goes
for the answer. While all of the answers may be valid in their
specific context, we presently cannot give a single, authoritative
answer without accessing multiple systems and declaring caveats
as to the timeliness and accuracy of the data. This presents
a challenge for both the interagency fire community and line
management at all levels of our agencies and departments.
By interconnecting these systems, new and updated information
would automatically propagate to the different interagency systems.
For some systems, we anticipate that data will be pre-populated
and validated instead of manually being re-input.
Goals of the iRWIn capability:
- Allow consistent reporting of data
- Reduce, if not eliminate, the duplicate entry of data
- Speed access to data located in diverse source systems
- Increase data accuracy
- Increase the availability of data and,
- Identify authoritative sources
Presently, we have identified 13 primary systems, and 9 secondary
systems as candidates for interconnection. These systems include:
Computer Aided Dispatch, decision support, incident management,
financial management, situation analysis, weather, public information,
and final fire reporting.
The internal customers to these systems include: fire management
and operations, fiscal managers, line officers, resource specialists,
researchers, and planners. The external customers include: affected
and/or interested public; local, county, and state governments;
other Departments and federal agencies; international parties;
Congress; and the Administration.
We want to provide a scalable capability to interconnect existing
and future interagency systems, not create a new, single, monolithic
system to replace all existing systems. Some of the existing
systems are technologically capable of interconnecting today,
while others (like our current Computer Aided Dispatch system
– WildCAD), will need a technological refresh.
iRWIn is envisioned to provide both the capability for our interagency
systems to interconnect and the ability for some of our systems
to mature.
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