3rd Standards Development Organizations (SDO) Emergency Services Workshop



Background

Summoning police, fire department, ambulance or other emergency services in case of emergency is one of the fundamental and most-valued functions of the telephone. As telephone functionality moves from circuit-switched telephony to Internet telephony, its users rightfully expect that this core functionality will continue to work at least as well as is has for the older technology. New devices and services are being made available which could be used to make a request for help which are not traditional telephones, and users are increasingly expecting them to be used to place emergency calls. However, many of the technical advantages of Internet multimedia require re-thinking of the traditional emergency calling architecture. This challenge also offers an opportunity to improve the operation of emergency calling technology, while potentially lowering its cost and complexity.

Existing emergency services rely exclusively on voice and conventional text telephony (known as TTY in the United States) media streams. However, more choices of media offer additional ways to communicate and evaluate the situation as well as to assist callers and call takers to handle emergency calls. For example, instant messaging, wideband speech codecs and video could improve the ability to communicate and evaluate the situation and to provide appropriate instruction prior to arrival of emergency crews. Future emergency services will allow the creation of sessions of any media type, negotiated between the caller and PSAP using existing SIP protocol mechanisms.


Motivation

Today many standardization activities take place with regard to various parts of the emergency service architecture. They are, however, not as coordinated as they could be. There is the danger that uncoordinated activities lead to solutions that either do not work in some circumstances or to solutions that lead to duplicate work due to lack of knowledge of work done by other SDOs.

Two SDO emergency services workshops have been held already and a number of other smaller coordination activities took place. These two workshops took place in the US (New York and Washington DC) whereas this workshop is hosted in Europe.


Scope & Agenda

This workshop is restricted in scope to citizen-to-authority communication and authority-to-citizen emergency services. 

The agenda can be found here.

Goals

The goals of this workshop are:

  • To learn more about the ongoing and upcoming emergency related work
  • To synchronize standardization efforts
  • To provide and to receive feedback

This is an information sharing event. New insights and new contacts from other SDOs will help the participants to influence work in their organization.

A list of participants can be found here. Pictures from the meeting can be found here


Meeting Venue

The meeting will take place at the following location:

Cisco Systems Belgium S.A. / N.V.
Pegasus Park.
De Kleetlaan, 6A. (Entrance between 6A and 6B)
B-1831 - Diegem - Belgium


The meeting venue is very close to the airport Zaventem and railway station Diegem.

The following meeting rooms will be used.

  • Main room: Emerald (70 p. max)
  • Rooms Jade + Topaz (for coffee breaks and standing lunches)
  • Rooms Quartz + Crystal (for breakout sessions -> 10 p. max)

Meeting Date

October 30st - November 1st 2007 (8:30am-6:00pm, every day)


Accommodation

Hotels at walking distance are: (except Hobbit)

Hotels at walking distance are: (except Hobbit)

Formule1 Hotel

+32 2 725.69.00 (32 EURO + 5 EURO for breakfast)

Etap Hotel

+32 2 709.55.90 (50 EURO + 5 EURO for breakfast)

Hobbit Hotel

+32 2 709.78.00 (56 EURO including breakfast)

Holiday Expr. Hotel +32 2 725.33.80 (136 EURO including breakfast)

NH Br. Airport Hotel

+32 2 203.92.52 (142 EURO + 21 EUR for breakfast)

Holiday Inn Hotel

+32 2 720.58.65 (166 EURO + 21 EUR for breakfast)



Workshop Presentations

In order to structure the discussions the organizers require title, abstract and duration of the presentation to be available by October 20, 2007. 

The EDAS system will also be used for uploading abstracts and papers and for participant registration. The EDAS workshop webpage can be found at https://edas.info/r5867 or via http://edas.info (Register tab).

Final presentation slides and full papers have to be available by October 26, 2007. The slides will be distributed after the workshop.

The slides can be found here. The meeting minutes are available here:

Workshop Registration

This meeting is again planned as a public workshop. Participants are, howerver, required to register via the EDAS system. Registered participants are allowed to Cisco meeting venue. Early registration ends October 25, 2007. 100 Euros need to be collected as a registration fee. 

The registration webpage can be found here: https://edas.info/r5867


Social Event

Wednesday includes a social event that is enabled by the generosity of our sponsors, Deutsche Telekom and Cisco Systems. The evening will start with a 25km bus ride from the meeting venue to the city of Antwerp. There we will tour a working brewery (http://www.dekoninck.be/) where we can sample the fare and enjoy a nice meal. From the brewery we will board a train for a tour of the old city (http://www.trabel.com/antwerp-map.htm) before returning to the meeting venue by bus at about 22:00.

Remote Participation

Jabber Chat Room

The Jabber chat room can be found here: esw07@conference.ecotroph.net

If you are new to Jabber then you might want to take a look at the following webpage.  

Jabber logfiles:

Audio Recording

The program chairs produced podcast recordings of the meeting. The recordings can be found here.

Program Chairs


This workshop is organized by the following persons.

Raymond Forbes
Hannu Hietalahti
Roger Hixson
Marc Linsner
Stephen McCann
Christian Militeau
Henning Schulzrinne
Hannes Tschofenig
Harry Worstell

If you have questions please direct them to Hannes.Tschofenig@gmx.net with a subject header of "SDO Emergency Services Workshop".
Last modified: 21st November 2007