Earlier, I wrote about XML for criminal justice. Today I found a reference to XML for first responders (they say emergency management). Here are some of the initiatives that look interesting:

• Common Alerting Protocol which is billed as a standard method should be developed to collect and relay instantaneously and automatically all types of hazard warnings and reports locally, regionally and nationally for input into a wide variety of dissemination systems.
• Automatic Crash Notification Initiative which would be used in a system like OnStar so that your car can notify the police when its been in an accident.
• Emergency XML which would create an open XML-based standard for emergency management data exchange.

There are more listed, but these were the most interesting to me right now. These sorts of initiatives are going to make a difference because in the past, even though the technology was there to exchange this information, no one could solve the political questions of what format. Now the world (thanks to XML) is forcing people to develop standard interchange formats. The other side of the job is transport and while that has to be done well and right, its not nearly as political.