Overview[]
Virtual USA (vUSA) is a collaborative effort among the Science and Technology Directorate (S&T), other DHS agencies, and state and local emergency management agencies, to improve information sharing among agencies and other partners. This ability to share information strengthens responders’ understanding of a situation, allowing better decisions to be made based on complete information.
The vUSA approach is a blend of process and technology, helping agencies develop relationships and agreements among partners while providing the data pipeline that allows these agencies to easily share information. Participating agencies make their data available to others as a standard web feed and pull others’ links from the vUSA Prototype to display in their own map viewers. The success of vUSA rests not only on improving technical capabilities, but also on encouraging trusted relationships among the community.