The North Central Texas Fusion System has been operational since 2006, currently supporting 1350 regional users from 170 jurisdictions and agencies.  The Fusion System incorporates more than 150 million data items.  The Fusion System is a remotely-accessed data sharing and analysis system.  The stakeholders include homeland security, law enforcement, health departments, fire, medical providers, medical examiners, and emergency management as well as state and federal agencies.  The Fusion System is primarily focused on the prevention and early warning of natural, accidental and intentional disasters in the region.   The Fusion System is also used to support emergency response, field personnel, and investigations. 

 

The Fusion System capabilities include:

·         a data collections and aggregation approach that allows analysts to “connect the dots”;

·         tools that allow user-specified topical requests that automatically gather targeted data on a continuous basis;

·         algorithms that drive the automatic collection of data for analysis;

·         automatic collection, format, conversion, indexing and storage management per a user-specified schedule;

·         tools that automatically detect and graphically display relationships between data items;

·         access management that assures data is only made available to authorized users and assuring compliance with all statutory requirements and established protocols;

·         models that detect pre-incident indicators and draw attention to potential threats; and

·         analysis tools that extract, visualize and summarize key concepts from enormous quantities of data.

 

Of particular note are two major differentiators from other Fusion Centers: 

1)   the data from hundreds of data sources is integrated such that all the data from multiple jurisdictions and multiple disciplines can be searched or analyzed with one request and one log-in (rather than hundreds).  The outcome is the identification of linkages across multiple databases and the identification of patterns across massive amounts of disparate data.  Another outcome is that threat models and pre-incident indicator models can bring together widely-spread but highly-interrelated data for unprecedented disaster prevention and early warning, and 

2)  the software is integrated into a system that automates many of the intelligence processes and provides remote access (using secure socket layer) from any computer that has an Internet browser.  The net outcome is that users do not need to travel to the facility where the Fusion System is housed – the system can be accessed from their own offices.