Mr. Kern worked with Lt Col Hoogasian of USAF, Lt Cdr Chris Kluckuhn of USCG, Bob Roth of USDA, Col Troy Campbell of CAP and others to promote the use of the Cursor on Target program for interagency interoperability.
The Cursor on Target protocol (CoT) is a tiny schema designed to be transmitted over radio links and other narrow bandwidth communications. Because it is small it can be used to transmit the position and type of many simultaneous objects on a map.
Mr. Kern provided the detailed information to MITRE to allow the CoT protocol to be extended to cover alarms, critical infrastructure, disaster and emergency management unit types for "blue force tracking", and standard incident types. THe protocol now reflects compliance with the FEMA BRT (basic Resource Types) and the NIMS (national Incident Management System).
Mr. Kern worked to create translation and XML router interoperability to allow the other common emergency management protocols (IEEE 1512, OASIS) to be translated to CoT for the purpose of situation awareness display. Once complete, a nationwide civilian situation awareness system would improve the performance of elected and professional leadership in an emergency, just as SA works for the military leadership. It would probably help to prevent the president from praising a fouled up mess as he did when "Brownie" was doing a "good job". It would also probably have caused "Brownie" to do a far better job. It would be clear to all where the evacuation busses are, where the victims are, and where the supplies are.
At the time of this writing the work is still ongoing.
"If you do anything long enough, you eventually get good at it." MK