Public Comment

[comment-form@oasis-open.org]

Comment from: l.freudinger@dfrc.nasa.gov

We have briefly studied the CAP 1.0 schema in search of weaknesses in its applicability to future airborne sensor systems that may or may not support emergency management.

I am happy to report that v1.0 appears usable as is for prototyping purposes.  

The one area we see for improvement is to formally designate a place for optional Resource Description Framework (RDF) data.

For more info on RDF see
http://www.w3.org/RDF/
or 
http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-concepts/

This tweak to Common Alerting Protocol establishes a path toward incorporating information that would be required to automate portions of complex decision support infrastucture.

A bit of background on our application:  

We are considering two aspects of a future network-centric world:

1) Uninhabited air vehicles carry scientific or earth-observing instruments.  These systems report their findings when necessary via CAP-formatted messaging. In the long term we are talking here about messaging standards for large scale sensor webs used as a component of decision support infrastructure.

2) Vehicles of all types expand their use of systems health monitoring and proactive or condition-based maintenance.  For example, a structural subsystems monitor may detect imminent failure of an engine pylon or horizontal stabilizer of a transport aircraft.  A CAP-formatted message alerts decisionmakers with just enough advanced warning to avoid catastrophic loss of life.  In contrast to item #1 that looks at geographically distributed sensor webs, this item looks at the embedded systems that provide safety-related information for individual machines (airplanes in our case).

I am recommending the explicit accommodation of RDF elements as a way to pave the path toward enabling so-called "intelligent" software to optimally leverage 
CAP messages.

Sincerely
Larry Freudinger
NASA Dryden Flight Research Center

Acknowledgement:  Thanks to colleague Carl E. Sorenson, software engineer with ManTech Int'l for providing inputs on this topic.