International Radiological Information Exchange (IRIX ... · PDF fileTOOLS TOOLS International Radiological Information Exchange (IRIX) standard The IAEA has developed the International

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International Radiological Information Exchange (IRIX) standard

The IAEA has developed the International Radio-logical Information Exchange (IRIX) as the recomm-ended standard to exchange information among emergency response organizations at national and international levels during a nuclear or radiological emergency. The standard addresses both the data content and format (XML format) and the system interface specification. Data can include status in-formation about a nuclear installation, information about any radioactive releases to the environment, information on protective actions taken or planned by affected countries, environmental radiation mon-itoring data. The system interface specification (or web-service specification) enables organizations to interconnect their emergency information systems to automate their information exchange in an em-ergency. The IRIX standard allows the information to be processed, summarized and presented quickly—for example, on status boards in emergency response centres.

Version 1.0 of the IRIX XML format was issued on 31 March 2013, whereas version 1.0 of the IRIX web-service interface specification is currently under dev-elopment. The IRIX specifications are available to counterparts of the IAEA’s Incident and Emergency Centre (IEC). Example of an IRIX report containing radiological measurements data

Nuclear Safety and Security Programme

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Figure 1: Typical method for converting between national format and IRIX using the XSLT transformations

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IRIX is currently implemented in emergency information systems, such as the IAEA’s webcommunication platform for nuclear and radio-logical incidents and emergencies - the Unified System for Information Exchange in Incidents and Emergencies (USIE) and the European Com-mission’s system for urgent radiological in-formation exchange (WebECURIE). Further IRIX developments focus on the implementation of IRIX in national emergency information systems and on exploring ways and arrangements th-rough which IRIX-related web services can en-hance the effectiveness of information exchange in emergencies.

The implementation of IRIX in a national in-formation system for interconnecting it with the IAEA’s USIE system or some other counterpart’s system involves defining a mapping between the internal information structure and the standard IRIX information structure. If the in-ternal information structure is similar to the IRIX information structure and already available as an XML format, the mapping can then be implemented quite easily using standard XML tools such as XSLT (Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations), as illustrated in Figure 1. Once the national system has been interconnected with a counterpart system, the information contained in reports in the IRIX format can automatically be exchanged via “machine-to-machine” transactions, replacing, or complementing, the “operator-to-machine” or “operator-to-operator” information exchange, which is usually slower and non-error-free.

For further Information:Contact: [email protected]

Write to:Incident and Emergency CentreDepartment of Nuclear Safety and SecurityInternational Atomic Energy AgencyVienna International Centre, PO Box 1001400 Vienna, Austria