Patent ID: 7337146

Claim:
A wide-area emergency information management system for targeted distribution of information content to authorized recipients, to support response to an incident reported to the management system, comprising: a security authentication module that encrypts information content as encrypted digital content; a server, arranged to receive an incident report and to determine from the incident report a type of the incident and a geographic location of the incident; a policy management system coupled to the server for managing information content distribution, wherein the policy management system applies business rules to select information content for distribution based on incident types, recipients' roles, and geo-spatial proximity of each recipient to the determined geographic incident location; a broadcast module that securely pre-positions said encrypted digital content on a plurality of remote recipient devices prior to receiving an incident report and that transmits an incident control file in response to the received incident report to a selected group of recipients as determined by the type of incident and the geographic location of the incident; and a receiver application program stored on each of the recipient devices, each receiver application program programmed to: communicate with the broadcast module to receive the encrypted digital content and the subsequent incident control file, securely cache the digital content received from the broadcast module prior to receiving an incident report, and in response to receipt of the incident control file, decrypt at least selected portions of the previously cached digital content, alert an authenticated user of the receiver application, and enable access to at least a selected portion of the pre-positioned digital content based on the incident type and a role of the authenticated user; wherein the cached digital content remains inaccessible to a user of the recipient device until the incident control file is received at the recipient device.