Atom index for California CAP feed (was Re: [emergency] nonXMLContent)

[Art Botterell <acb@incident.com>]

Carl and All -

Interesting this should come up... and heading in a slightly  
different direction, thus the explicit thread-fork.  Attached is a  
working draft on how the next-generation California Emergency Digital  
Information Service (www.edis.ca.gov) may use Atom to index its CAP  
1.1 feed.

Whereas EDXL is chiefly a wrapper for directed "push" routing of  
items and sets of content, the RSS/Atom style of "feed" offers a  
lightweight mechanism for one-to-very-many "broadcast" dissemination  
over the Net.  It's a convenient way to aggregate the state of a  
system and disclose it to the public (or some other relatively large  
and possibly ad-hoc audience.)

As for the Atom/RSS holy wars... either format would work.  My mild  
preference for Atom in this application sprang from, a) its use of  
XML-style dateTime formats, and, b) what seems like a bit less of  a  
bias toward necessarily human-readable content.  (Then again, I'm not  
wild about the HTML-style <link> construct in Atom, which seems a bit  
out of step with the rest of the design.  But that's not a debate we  
need to get into here.)

You'll note several extensions from a couple of namespaces.  The  
<format> element is a particularly useful, IMHO, by being explicit  
about pointing to a variety of XML document types (including even  
other Atom feeds, which creates some nice recursion opportunities.)   
Although there may be another way to accomplish that end, and I'm  
certainly open to helpful suggestions.

Not sure this is something we need to try to standards-track this at  
this point... it might be better to just Cookbook it for now and see  
if experience has any lessons to teach us... but I did want to get  
the eyes of the TC on it as early as possible.

Thanks!

- Art

CAPAtom.doc