Biosurveillance Common Operating Network

Overview
The Biosurveillance Common Operating Network (BCON) (formerly National Biosurveillance Integration System (NBIS) 2.0) is an information technology (IT) system developed by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Office of Health Affairs (OHA) to provide comprehensive, integrated biosurveillance situational awareness as part of a national interagency effort. The purpose of BCON is to provide a biosurveillance integration system that enables two-way flow of information to integrate the areas of human, animal, and plant health surveillance, environmental monitoring of air, agriculture, water, and food, and intelligence to accomplish the following DHS objectives:


 * Early recognition,
 * Situational awareness to guide response,
 * Real-time integration of biosurveillance data with threat information through partnering With federal agencies,
 * Repository for reference databases.

Pursuant to Presidential Directives [[HSPD-9 and HSPD-10, the DHS initiated the NBIS program to support the administration's bio-defense policy objectives, requnnq DHS and other departments and agencies to, among other activities, coordinate national tnosurveillance capabilities The BCON system IS currently being developed to provide the National Operations Center (NOG) and the Interagency Incident Management Group (IIMG) With a capability for early recognition of a biological attack or biological outbreak NBIS 2 0 Will provide coordination With other federal departments and agencies In creating a new biological threat awareness capability to enhance detection and characterization of an attack and may possibly Include nuclear, radiological and public health concerns also

BCO Will eventually Integrate as many as 120 data streams from Individual, mostly unrelated systems including open source news feeds and systems managed by partnennq federal agencies. NBIS 20 Will receive frequent data updates from these sources and fuse them to provide a tnosurveillance common operating picture (BCOP), and enable members of the National Biosurveillance Group (NBSG) to perform detailed analyses usmq cutting-edge detection and characterization alqonthrns The system Will also provide a platform for communication and collaboration when potential events are Identified and response scenarios are created The system functionality Will Include the ability to view and manipulate visual analyncs snapshots that capture a set of data and visualizations (bar graph, scatter plot, etc) related to a specfic analysis performed by the NBIS analyst The system Will also Incorporate Geographic Information System (GIS) mapping functionality Including the ability to create and save meaningful map views of source data along With other appropriate layer data (e g, road networks, water features, etc)