The Responder Knowledge Base, funded by the Department of Homeland Security, has spent 2004 positioning itself as a critical resource for the emergency responder community. The RKB has added information on over 3,000 products, over 350 standards, training, certifications, and grants, and has become the official home of the FY2005 Authorized Equipment List, which gives guidance for the Office of Domestic Preparedness? billion-dollar grant program.

The RKB has also partnered with numerous programs benefiting the responder community. Early this year, we partnered with the System Assessment and Validation for Emergency Responders (SAVER) program through Texas A&M University. The SAVER Program provides high quality, impartial, operationally relevant evaluations/validations of critical emergency responder equipment and systems and provides these results in an operationally useful format.