Comments on CAP v1.1 IPAWS Profile

[Harold Price <hprice@sagealertingsystems.com>]

This document is a good starting point for discussion.  I don't have 
any specific comments at this time.

In general, however, I'm opposed to having a single alert containing 
multiple info blocks, some for different target-system types, some 
for different languages, etc, with the only guideline that the info 
blocks must refer to the same event, but only the category and 
eventCode values must match. That allows too much room for drift 
within the alert, or sub-alerts with different times, or different texts.

Every attempt should be made to combining the needs of the various 
target systems into a single info block before giving up and 
supporting n targets and l languages by having n*l info blocks.

To the extent possible, an alert should be normalized - the same unit 
of data should appear in at most one place, otherwise it is too easy 
to get different information (not just the same information formatted 
differently) sent to different systems in the same alert.

Also, multiple info blocks could attempt to generate multiple EAS 
alerts (with different effective times) - which is another reason why 
the EAS-CAP industry group proposed limited EAS devices to looking at 
a single info block - this area is fraught with problems.

If multiple info blocks must be used, they should be limited to 
identical values for as many of the same parameters as possible, 
which can be machine checked to make sure they are they 
same.  Multiple languages for an event should be the only use of 
multiple info blocks.

Harold Price
Sage Alerting Systems