Public Safety Knowledge Center

The Public Safety Knowledge Center (PSKC) is an online collaborative knowledge and solution development and sharing platform for the public safety community.

Building on Web/Enterprise 2.0 technologies used by the national intelligence community’s collaborative Intellipedia, the PSKC is an advanced wiki-content management system (CMS) that contains an ever growing base of knowledge and solutions contributed by members of the extended public safety community (e.g., state, county and local law enforcement, homeland security and emergency management, fire safety and community safety). The platform requires no technical skills or training other than basic typing and word processing, so members (who are provided varying access and editing capability according to their member profiles) can easily create or edit texts.

Whereas Intellipedia serves as a collaborative knowledge sharing and development platform for authorized individuals within the 16 agencies of the U.S. intelligence community and other national-security related organizations, the PSKC serves the wider public safety community as both a collaborative encyclopedia and integrated repository of public domain documents, collaboratively written open-content texts (e.g., manuals, guides, lessons learned), and attributable and non-editable digital documents.

These primary components are:


 * Quick Reference - an online collection of facts related to public safety and security that anyone (for general texts) or authorized users (for selective texts) can collaboratively create, edit, and organize.
 * Identification Wizard - search engine query scripts that search data sources according to descriptive keywords supplied by the query use. Used by public safety officers to identify unknown subjects. The Identification Wizards below are currently under development.
 * Pill Identifier (Commonly abused pharmaceutical drugs)
 * Firearm and Ammunition Identifier
 * Gang Symbol Identifier
 * Vehicle Identification Number Search
 * Hazmat Placard and Symbol Identifier
 * PublicSource - a free library of source texts which are in the public domain or legally available for free redistribution. As such, it serves as an online repository of free content publications collected and maintained by the community.
 * OpenBooks - a collection of free open-content textbooks, annotated texts and manuals. Using a collaborative wiki platform, OpenBooks are written collaboratively using the PSKC common platform.
 * SharedLibrary - a collection of attributable and non-editable digital documents submitted by members.