Re: [emergency-cap-profiles] info block rationale

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

>>> Jacob Westfall <jake@jpw.biz> 12/31/2008 11:20 AM >>>
>Distinct audiences, ie areas/responses, is a very common occurrence. 


It's not unusual, but the use of multiple info blocks to address it
hasn't turned out to be common in practice, at least not anywhere I've
seen.  That may be, at least partly, because warning originators tend to
address one problem at a time, in whatever they feel is appropriate
priority order.  Faced with high cognitive workloads they tend to avoid
complex formulations.

Anyway, this strikes me as an example of the eternal battle between
right and right.  There's no absolute right or wrong answer... only a
tradeoff between the interest of implementers in simplicity and that of
information architects in concise and complete data structures.  

Being of the "walk before we try to run" school, I personally like to
err on the side of simplicity whenever it doesn't foreclose future
options.  So I'm thinking this might be an area where the profile might
simplify things for implementers at both the origination and
dissemination ends.  The same information can be represented in multiple
distinct CAP messages (associated, if there's a desire, by a shared
incident-tag value.)

- Art