RE: NWS CAP Wiki [SEC=UNCLASSIFIED]

UNCLASSIFIED

Mike,

Thanks for this Wiki link. Looks to be an interesting resource as a starting point for an online Best Practice Guide [maybe]. I really like the layout where you can hyperlink to each CAP element / sub-element and quickly see the best practice description of how to use it, an example and other notes to consider. The <eventEndingTime> example shows how easy this can be done for a sub-element that is not yet included in OASIS CAP, which creates a forum to develop new functionality through an evolutionary approach.

I looked back in the meeting notes from the WMO CAP Workshop held in April 2011 and noted the following information captured in those notes against the NWS Presentation made by Herb White: The NWS will put a wiki online in Spring 2011 to encourage collaboration with CAP users and developers. The NWS sees great value in CAP and wants to increase warning effectiveness by leveraging CAP to incorporate useful parameters and content to better personalize hazard threats. A Workshop participant asked whether NWS plans to expand its methods for ingest of observational input (which may be related to the concept of "crowd sourcing").

I was the “participant” who asked this question because I saw the wiki idea as a great method to gather best practice ideas. I’d appreciate a quick brief from you during the next Profiles SC meeting you can attend, that highlights how NWS would like international CAP Users to contribute to the CAP Wiki. I can then feed this guidance to Australian CAP Users who are eager for me to develop a Best Practice Guide but it is not currently able to be resourced in my scope of work. I do see that NWS has included a Collaborative Discussion page / talk page to collect comments and communicate with other users regarding the content of the page, so I would be keen to hear your ideas on how Australian CAP Users might contribute.

Re: your observation about <onset> sub-element – this is not included in the CAP-AU Profile because there is no reason to deviate from the use already described in the parent OASIS CAPv1.2 standard. There are numerous sub-elements that appear to be missing from the AU profile, but this was deliberate because there is no reason to deviate from CAP v1.2 best practice.

Here is some food for thought:

1) Could we include a separate section in the NWS Wiki that could link to how each element – Sub-element might be used differently by other nations or organisations?

2) Could this wiki idea be expanded to include an interoperability map that cross references the <event> and <eventcode> values used by one nation, with the corresponding codes used by another nation?

Greg Trott

CAP-AU Project Manager

Australian Government Attorney-General's Department

From: Mike Gerber [mailto:mike.gerber@noaa.gov]
Sent: Tuesday, 31 January 2012 8:49 AM
To: emergency-cap-profiles@lists.oasis-open.org
Subject: Issues for CAP-AU profile

Gang,

Our (NWS) interpretation of <effective> and <expires> as documented in the NWS CAP wiki may not be consistent with the Australian profile.

I noticed there is no <onset> tag in the AU profile. However, NWS is making every effort to differentiate between the effective time (<effective>) of the information in the alert message, the expected time of the beginning of the event (<onset>), the time at which the information in the message should no longer be used (<expires>), and the time at which the hazard conditions of the subject event are no longer expected (optional parameter we've added called <eventEndingTime> and wish to propose as standard for CAP v2.0).

I look forward to our discussion on Wednesday.

Mike

--

Mike Gerber

NOAA/National Weather Service

Office of Climate, Water, and Weather Services

301-713-0090 x170

Mike.Gerber@noaa.gov

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