| Rapid and slow onset disasters require coordination between emergency responder and public health organizations. Many organizations are involved in the delivery of medical emergency disaster services: emergency medical services (EMS), the fire and police departments, hospitals, public health officials, local authorities, etc. Resource planning, logistic coordination, and information sharing among all these units is therefore very important to save lives and reduce costs. To satisfy these needs, with the auspices of the National Institute of Health/National Library of Medicine, Semandex Networks is building the Medical Emergency Disaster Response Network (MEDRN). MEDRN uses Semantic Network technology developed by Semandex to satisfy the DoD’s NetCentric mandates. The technology is currently fielded by SPAWAR, the Marine Corps and other DoD and non DoD national security agencies.
MEDRN is an information mutual aid network. A participating community or organization shares its data (e.g. resource databases, logistic info, event/dispatch data, best operating practices, etc.) by connecting it to the network. In return the community gets rapid access to the information provided by the other participating communities and organizations. MEDRN therefore enables Incident Commanders, first responders and public health officials access to the information they need, when they need it regardless of where it is located and who owns it. The system provides a Common Operating Picture of an incident and enables the Virtual Command Post.
At the core of MEDRN is a distributed content network that uses a situational ontology to enable disparate emergency response, logistic and public health systems to communicate with one another. The network architecture allows the system to scale like the Internet, and enables data providers to maintain the ownership of their data. The situational ontology is the language through which participating communities communicate. |
| Daniel Reininger is the CEO of Semandex Networks, Inc. He is responsible for the strategic direction and management of Semandex Networks, the leader in the application of semantic routing, a concept that the company pioneered to solve information integration and management problems of government and commercial organizations. Dr. Reininger co-founded the company in May 2000 and has since then been leading the company through the transition from start-up to a profitable operational business, growing revenues every year. Before starting Semandex, Dr. Reininger worked at NEC USA and the Sarnoff Corporation where he designed and patented techniques for the management of multimedia traffic, considered instrumental for the successful deployment of next-generation mobile multimedia services. At Sarnoff and NEC, Dr. Reininger research results contributed to improve and differentiate key products like DBS TV, HDTV and ATM switches. He also supported the commercialization of those innovations with external corporate clients, internal business units, and joint ventures. Dr. Reininger has over 50 publications in the areas of networking and image processing.
Dr. Reininger holds a PhD in Electrical and Computing Engineering from Rutgers University and a BS and MS degree in Electrical Engineering from the Illinois Institute of Technology.
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