FW: [CAP] How do you properly indicate "Nothing Interesting?"

["Bob Wyman" <bob@wyman.us>]

I've been looking at the NWS CAP alerts that are provided at:
http://www.nws.noaa.gov/alerts/. One thing that is very confusing
about these alerts is that there exist many alerts that say: "There
are no active watches, warnings or advisories." The difficulty here is
that it is very difficult, without custom coding, for a computer based
application to know that these alerts are *not* talking about critical
situations. For instance, the "urgency," "severity," and "certainty"
of these alerts is always "unknown." To me, "unknown" means that
something might be of any urgency. Thus, if I receive a message with
unknown urgency I am compelled to treat it in the same manner that I
would treat a message that had an urgency of the highest possible
level. But, that would be wrong in this case.

It seems to me that CAP data should be as precise as possible to
ensure that messages can be accurately routed and also that only the
absolute minimum number of messages are ever delivered to anyone.
However, if I base a system on the CAP messages from NWS, I'll end up
having to send messages which basically say "Never mind..."  This
doesn't sound good. Wouldn't it make more sense to have a code of
"none" (not currently supported) for urgency and severity and a
certainty of "Very Likely" in these messages?

        bob wyman

Example of ambiguous NWS message follows:

 <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes" ?>
<http://weather.gov/alerts/mp.cap#> - <cap:alert
xmlns:cap="http://www.incident.com/cap/0.9a1";>
  <cap:identifier>wwa_Marianas</cap:identifier>
  <cap:sender>w-nws.webmaster@noaa.gov</cap:sender>
  <cap:sent>2004-03-02T23:38:25-0500</cap:sent>
  <cap:status>Actual</cap:status>
  <cap:msgType>Alert</cap:msgType>
  <cap:scope>Public</cap:scope>
  <cap:note>Current Watches, Warnings and Advisories for Marianas
Issued by the National Weather Service</cap:note>

<cap:references>http://www.nws.noaa.gov/alerts/mp.html</cap:references
>
 <http://weather.gov/alerts/mp.cap#> - <cap:info>
  <cap:category>Met</cap:category>
  <cap:event>na</cap:event>
  <cap:urgency>Unknown</cap:urgency>
  <cap:severity>Unknown</cap:severity>
  <cap:certainty>Unknown</cap:certainty>
  <event_desc>There are no active watches, warnings or
advisories</event_desc> </cap:info> </cap:alert>