About I-Bridge

As part of the project “The Netherlands: country of entrepreneurship and innovation” the government initiated social innovation programmes in the field of water, safety, care and energy. These programmes must contribute to solutions for major social issues. In this social innovation programme the input of know-how, innovation and entrepreneurship for solving social issues is the central subject. The i-Bridge concept makes it possible to link a number of various communication components in varying combinations to each other based on Internet Protocols. Secure, real-time collaboration and logging hence become possible. This development solves a number of bottlenecks, as identified in the roadmap of the Social Innovation Agenda Safety, including the build-up of an integrated common situational picture. During demonstrations and exercises it was proved that the five core functionalities that are required to act effectively and in a coordinated way during a disaster, both individually and in every required combination, can be supported with the i-Bridge concept. 

These five core functionalities are: 

• (Ad hoc) Collaboration. Concerns secure ad-hoc online collaboration. 
• Reporting. Concerns activities with regard to logging and scenario plotting. 
• Geo harmonisation. Concerns the synchronising of geographic information in various forms and applying this information again for each context.
• Voice harmonisation. Concerns Voice Interoperability, whereby all forms of speech communication are converted into IP and harmonised with IP through software. 
• Crypto harmonisation or access management and protection of information. This makes it possible to connect unequal protection levels and networks to each other under predefined conditions. By doing this, open and closed sources can be added and analysed and feedback can take place to the participants on the right security level.  

RAVEN UAV Launch (source NLMOD)