Re: [emergency] Tactical Situation Object

["Art Botterell" <ABott@so.cccounty.us>]

The TSO came up at the first CAP meeting in Geneva a couple of years
ago, at which time that CAP 1.0 mapping was presented by the EC folks as
evidence that the two were compatible.  The TSO is similar to the CAP
message in many regards but, as the name suggests, it's more oriented
toward responders than to the public.

Interestingly, the TSO (at least as it stood back then) deals with
multilinguality by not using text values at all.  Everything was a coded
selection from an enumeration of values.  That achieved language
independence at the cost of some degree of inflexibility; if a
particular situation isn't described in the pre-existing TSO taxonomy,
there's not really a good way to represent it with any precision. 
Again, that's less of a problem in the relatively constrained domain of
official emergency responses than in the less predictable realm of
public information.

I would think revisiting the TSO would be germaine to the CAP 2.0
discussion, to see if there are any lessons or synergies there.  And I
imagine the same would be the case for other EDXL specs.

Also... just in case folks didn't catch it... the OASIS mentioned in
this email isn't us, it's a European Commission project of the same
acronym.

- Art

>>> Elysa Jones <ejones@warningsystems.com> 1/23/2009 9:43 AM >>>

Members,

Just wanted to know if any of you are aware of the emergency XML
standards work going on in Europe entitled "tactical situation 
object."  There is yet another OASIS organization out there.  The 
following is take from a paragraph on their web site

The first version of the TSO has been defined in the frame of the 
European Union project <http://www.oasis-fp6.org>OASIS (Open Advanced 
System for dISaster & emergency management); then the next versions 
have been discussed and set up in the CEN Workshop (the 'Information 
System for Disaster and Emergency Management' workshop).

The web site is:  http://www.tacticalsituationobject.org/ 

Are any of you aware of this work or involved?

Regards,
Elysa Jones, Chair
CTO, Warning Systems, Inc.
256-880-8702 x102