Re: [emergency-msg] <category> values validated?

[Kon Wilms <kon@datacast.biz>]

Just to play devil's advocate (please correct me if I'm wrong) - 
Telecommunications is categorized as infrastructure. How does one 
differentiate between a terrestrial telecommunications emergency (e.g. 
signal jamming) and a land-line telecommunications emergency (e.g. 
destruction of links). Must I filter the body of the message for 
additional keywords? If so, what is the use of the granularity to me? 
9-1-1 calls are listed under Other, but thats really telecommunications, 
which is listed under infrastructure. Isn't cybercrime a form of 
information network disruption? Could we not have a case of a terrorist 
threat category for CAP category Health (targeting hospitals). The 
granularity created here expands the reach but starts to look like 
spaghetti. I would hate to be either the developer having to write code 
to 'correctly' handle this granularity, or the poor shmuck at a dispatch 
center having to create the alert. Short of having training knowing each 
and every field, slip-ups will be widespread.

You know I'm not a fan of using human language to describe elements that 
computer language will have to post-process and categorize ;) and this 
seems like one of those --

what happens if changes have to get made to any of the specs, or they 
are expanded and wording in existing categories is changed (i.e. Road 
Crash gets changed to Road Accident) -- how do we tell people to 'fix' 
their now 'legacy' code? The only way to do it is with a really good 
regex parser, or line by line monkey-work. Heaven knows a spec isn't 
complete the first round.

Cheers
Kon

Art Botterell wrote:
> Friends -
> 
> Just for fun I'm attaching a comparison of the CAP 1.0 <category> values 
> with the more detailed taxonomy discussed today for a message-routing 
> header for general emergency data sharing.
> 
> It looks like our initial, very high-level taxonomy held up pretty well 
> against a wide range of categorization schemes and practitioner inputs.  
> The only casualty was the "Safety" category, which appears to have been 
> redundant.
> 
> I don't see this as an immediate action item... more of a nice-to-know 
> thing, for now... but it looks like whenever the time comes to revisit 
> CAP we'd have objective grounds for sticking with the current scheme 
> (sans "Safety", perhaps).  Alternatively, if we embrace the 
> finer-grained scheme from the "EDXL" project at some point, at least we 
> have reason to believe it'll map cleanly to our current version.
> 
> Thanks!
> 
> - Art
> 
> 
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