profile proliferation

[Jacob Westfall <jake@jpw.biz>]

Hi,
	An important concern was raised in today's call about profiles and their potential proliferation.  This speaks not only to the definition of a profile, but also to the criteria that should be established to determine what profiles the SC decides to consider for adoption.
	For example we have developed several dozen profiles although we use the term layer.  Many are implementation specific, some speak to presentation, others have some data in them, etc.  There are only a small number that I would consider meeting the adoption level for the SC.  So in defining a profile are there different types of profiles?  Is there a different name used for "profiles" that do not go through the SC but are still similar in nature?
	I used the example of border alerts but a more important one would be earthquakes.  Reviewing any USGS CAP alert you notice a number of custom parameters in use.  Typically this is information that may be found in the text description that is also being singled out for parameterization as well.  If this was just for USGS only then fine.  But the presumption is this information is also useful for others and should therefore be documented somehow to ensure other systems can interoperate.  But earthquakes aren't just a USGS only thing, other agencies and countries are naturally involved.  So if agency X uses a valueName of Mag and USGS uses Magnitude for the same values, interop suffers when these two agencies decide to share messages with each other, or the rest of the world.  This is where an SC level profile might come in that is used by all earthquake issuing authorities.
	So this leads to multi-profile alerts such as when the USGS issues their earthquake alert, it will include IPAWS profile components (US alert system specific) and Earthquake profile ones as well (international and inter-agency specific).

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jake@jpw.biz
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