RE: [CAP] Who can issue CAP alerts?

["Bob Wyman" <bob@wyman.us>]

Art Botterell wrote:
>>At 12:03 PM -0500 3/4/04, Bob Wyman wrote:
>>*	If I'm driving a car which can make phone calls and has a GPS
>>(i.e. like one of the OnStar systems), would it be proper for the
car 
>>(or the monitoring agency) to generate a CAP alert when the air-bag 
>>fires or if there is some other indication of an accident?
>...It could, although there's a more specialized Automatic Crash 
>Notification message format that's been created by the telematics 
>industry for that particular application.  (See 
> <http://www.comcare.org/projects/acninitiative.html>.)

	I must admit that I'm fairly confused by this response... I
had been under that impression that CAP, as the "Common Alerting
Protocol", was intended to produce a single, common alerting protocol.
However, Art (a major proponent of CAP) says that if I'm interested in
generating alerts concerning automobile crashes, I should be looking
at ACN rather than CAP. 
	If automotive alerts are an exception from CAP, what other
exceptions are there? Will we see so many exceptions being defined
that CAP will, in fact, not be the "Common" alerting protocol? If this
is the case, then what is the utility of CAP?
	It seems to me that being able to catch alerts from
automobiles is not only useful in itself (for fire, police, etc.) but
might be the first indication of something like a major terrorist
attack. For instance, if someone blows up the Brooklyn Bridge, the
first notice is probably going to come from all of the "air bag fired"
messages that come from the cars on the bridge and those that haven't
quite sunk into the East River yet... Software that monitors CAP
messages might actually generate an escalated message whenever
something like "20 air bags fire within 1000 yards of each other in
less than 1 minute."... Building such a monitor is going to be more
difficult if the alerting space is broken up into CAP + ACN + some
number of other alerting protocols.
	Is CAP really intended to be the "Common" Alerting Protocol?

		bob wyman