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The IAEA has developed the International Radiation Monitoring Information System (IRMIS), an international web- based application in support of the implementation of the Convention on Early Notification of a Nuclear Accident. IRMIS provides a mechanism for the reporting and visualization of large quantities of environmental radiation monitoring data during nuclear or radiological emergencies. The radiation monitoring data can be uploaded to IRMIS in the International Radiological Information Exchange (IRIX) format. A web interface has been designed in IRMIS through which authorized users may upload the reports of Emergency Data into IRMIS, either in IRIX format or using a pre-formatted spreadsheet template. These reports are subsequently reviewed and published on IRMIS by the IAEA Incident and Emergency Centre (IEC). IRIX is a technical standard developed by the IAEA in cooperation with experts from Member States and the European Commission (EC). It is designed to enable the development of interoperable systems and solutions for exchanging emergency information and data between organizations at both national and international level during a nuclear or radiological incident or emergency. IRIX is an open format developed by the IAEA based on the Extensible Markup Language (XML), which makes it both machine- and human-readable. It should be used to exchange radiological information between IAEA and RANET teams, or between any other two (or more) assisting parties, during a nuclear or radiological emergency. The IAEA has developed the IRIX format as the recommended standard to exchange information among emergency response organizations at national and international levels during a nuclear or radiological emergency. The standard covers the data content, the data format (XML), and the system interface specification. Data can include status information about a nuclear installation, information about any radioactive releases to the environment, information on protective actions taken or planned by affected countries, and environmental radiation monitoring data. The system interface specification (or web-service specification) enables organizations to interconnect their emergency information systems to automate their information exchange in an emergency. The IRIX standard allows the information to be processed quickly, summarized, and presented in an easily understood format: for example, on status boards in emergency response centres. Once the national system has been interconnected with a counterpart system, the information contained in reports in the IRIX format can be automatically exchanged via “machine-to-machine” transactions. These can replace or complement “operator-to-machine” or “operator-to-operator” information exchange, which is usually slower and not error-free. At present, US DOE/NNSA efforts to collect and share large quantities of radiological or nuclear emergency monitoring data are fragmented. The Emergency Response Group acquires data using multiple cell-nets, and communicates these data back to the Search Management Centre (SMC), which produces maps and briefing products. The RAP regions--which are vast--are using the RadResponder Network that is outside the scope of SMC and mainstream NNSA emergency response. The IAEA proposes to integrate all types of radiation data--survey, monitoring, environmental, and sampling — under one international umbrella, the International Radiation Monitoring Information System (IRMIS). The most significant restriction is that SMC is not a client server based system, whereas IRMIS is a distributed web- based application: it is managed by issuing user-level credentials with multi-level privileges. Unlike SMC, IRMIS is also independent of the origin and type of equipment used to collect the data (e.g. backpack, vehicle monitoring, or networked fixed-monitoring stations).
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