Re: [emergency-msg] CAP Channels

[Eliot Christian <echristi@usgs.gov>]

At 09:44 AM 8/14/2003 -0700, Art Botterell wrote:
>[...]
>Most of the RSS tools and applications out there are focused on the 
>syndication / dissemination of Web content to human users.  So I'm a 
>little concerned that if one presented a CAP channel as an RSS feed, one 
>might set oneself up for a lot of support calls from folks who fire up 
>their RSS client and then have trouble making sense of the unformatted XML.

Actually, my thinking about RSS is rather more primitive
than what Art seems to have in mind. In my model, the RSS
file of available CAP alerts is just a "table of contents".
All actual CAP alert content would not be in RSS format;
it would be in CAP format.

One way to make an RSS channel would be to compile RSS
items by extracting CAP message at the "alert/info" level.
(I am choosing one RSS channel per "info" because the info
level is typically distinguished by language). Each RSS
item within the RSS channel would then be simply an extract
of a few CAP elements, perhaps using something like the
following element equivalence:

CAP                        RSS
/alert                     /rss/channel/item
/alert/info/headline       /rss/channel/item/title
URI of this alert message  /rss/channel/item/link
/alert/info/description    /rss/channel/item/description
/alert/sender              /rss/channel/item/author
/alert/sent                /rss/channel/item/pubDate

I'd be the first to admit this is on the simplistic side,
but I think it would fit what RSS news readers are expecting.

Eliot