Emergency responders in the field now have a data-sharing standard that provides role-based information sharing in a crisis, an international standards organization announced today.

The Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards, a nonprofit, international consortium, has approved the Emergency Data Exchange Language Distribution Element (EDXL-DE) Version 1.0 as an OASIS standard, officials said in a statement.

EDXL-DE facilitates emergency information sharing and data exchange across local, regional, tribal, national and international organizations in the public and private sectors, OASIS officials said.

EDXL is a family of Extensible Markup Language-based standards to help improve information sharing among first responders, said Elysa Jones, chairwoman of the OASIS Emergency Management Technical Committee, which developed the standard. Jones is also engineering program manager at Warning Systems, an alert-activation company.

EDXL-DE is the first standard developed for EDXL, Jones said. Future standards will include one for hospital availability and another for handling different resources, such as generators, she said.

In practice, the standard serves as an envelope or wrapper that contains information about the sender, receiver, message contents and to whom and under what conditions the message can be sent, Jones said. Emergency information can be warning messages, spreadsheets, text documents, video footage and other data.

Messages wrapped in the code can move freely among standard-compliant systems.

"This will promote data interoperability between software systems to better equip emergency managers in the field," Jones said. The standard will enable emergency managers to exchange information without checking where to get different resources, she said.

"EDXL-DE will facilitate the implementation of a host of standards that will lead to fully interoperable sharing of information in emergency-related applications," said Chip Hines, acting director of the Office for Interoperability and Compatibility (OIC) in the Homeland Security Department's Science and Technology Directorate, in a statement.

"The ability of this standard to transmit any content, from files to technical data exchange information, provides immediate capability to the emergency response community," Hines said.

DHS has collaborated since 2004 with private-sector members of the Emergency Interoperability Consortium, a public/private partnership, to create EDXL, OASIS officials said. The group of standards was originally a DHS disaster-management project to enhance interagency disaster communications, they said.

DHS and the EIC created the requirement for the standard and OASIS developed the actual standard, Jones said.