Minutes for meeting 3/11/04

Here are the minutes of the Emergency Messages and Notification Subcommittee for March 16, 2004:

Roll:

Voting Members:
Walid Ramadan
Art Botterell
Rex Brooks
Gary Ham

Observers:
Carl Reed
Kwasi Speede

Tom Merkle and Eliot Christian notified the subscommittee that they had other commitments at the same time as this meeting. We had a quorum.

Carl Reed and Kwasi Speede attended, but are not carried on the roster, so should indicate to one of the co-chairs if voting membership is requested.

In addition to the agenda that was announced via email on the morning of the meeting, we were interested to hear how the Congressional Demonstration went, so Art Botterell gave us a briefing on that event, and agreed to write up a short description which we can use in our support activities for the current OASIS-wide CAP voting.

Art reported that the demonstration was part of an all-day event organized along the lines of a conference, with a series of seminars or workshops in the Hall of State Building during the day, and the demonstrations of data interoperability, transmitting emergency messages using XML data sets across and to multiple, independent platforms and applications taking place in the Rayburn House Office Building on Capitol Hill in the late afternoon and evening of Thursday, March, 11, 2004. The event was organized by Congressmember Curt Weldon subsequent to his attendance at the demonstration given last fall, September, 2003. Congressmember Weldon invited the Emergency Interoperability Consortium, (formerly the Emergency Management Consortium) and the ComCARE Alliance to present the combined event: Interoperability Now!

The demonstration went well in that the interoperability of CAP worked as intended with two demonstration networks, one through the Disaster Management Interoperability Services (DMIS) web services system which provides an API and CAP distribution service and the other through ComCARE's Emergency Provider Access Directory (EPAD) network which has a CAP "catching" capability.

The event was well-attended, and one attendee described it as "debutante ball for CAP."

The remainder of the meeting followed the posted agenda.

1. When should we tackle the issues raised on the public comment list:
Threads: Bad Examples in CAP Spec (UPPERCASE is bad human factors)

How do you properly indicate "Nothing Interesting?"

Unique Message Identifiers in CAP

Who can issue CAP alerts?

CAP and attribute-free encodings...

Normative References in the CAP Specification

What does a CAP date look like?

Our consensus was that this depends largely on the outcome of the vote for approval of CAP as an OASIS Standard. It was agreed that there are no "showstoppers" in the threads that have come into the TC from the Public Comment list.

It was noted that while the TC is obliged by OASIS policy to address any comments that are submitted by voting members during the voting process, the TC is not obliged to address comments that come in from the public list after the initial 30-day public comment period. However, it was also our consensus that we should address these comments either as part of our response to a negative decision in the OASIS balloting, or as features/change requests in the context of either errata to the CAP 1.0 Specification or as considerations for CAP 1.1.

2. CAP Support articles/FAQ

Art said he would write a description of the Interoperability Now! event, in addition to his contribution of a short brief on the history and status of CAP for our upcoming publishing activities. We also have a short brief from Gary Ham about DMIS and the CAP web services API. We are attempting to have this set of materials, including Tom Merkle's piece on CapWIN and some summaries of the Emergency Management TC's work on CAP.

3. Implementation Guide

One of the issues which was not discussed at the last TC meeting was what the progress had been made and what the expected timeframe for delivery is for the Implementation Guide. This action item was taken by Rex Brooks, who indicated that it dovetailed with similar work in which he was participating in other TCs and SCs, specifically the WSRP Primer. Allen has recently pointed out that this work appears to be lagging somewhat behind what was expected.

Specifically, in Allen's recent post on this topic, several developer-centric items were pointed out that reinforce one of the recent lessons Rex has brought back from his experience with the WSRP Primer.
This lesson is that the motivation behind both specific features and feature sets contained in specifications needs to be explained WHILE giving the specification's answer to that motivation.

Due to this consideration, Rex suggests that someone who is actively developing applications working with the CAP Specification will generate more germane questions which can then be answered at the point in the Implementation Guide where those issues arise. So, while Rex is still willing to work on the Guide in an editorial capacity, it is requested that a developer step forward to take on the bulk of this work.

The general consensus of the group was that the answers that were given to the question "What do you want in a FAQ for a new specification?" which Rex posted to the xml-dev list should afford a general rubric for an overall discussion of CAP. The developer-specific questions with a description of the features that address those questions should be the main focus of the Implementation Guide, along with some history of the specification.

Rex agreed that he will produce an outline for the Implementation Guide based on these considerations by the next TC meeting.

emergency-msg message