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Deborah Diaz
Office of the Chief Information Officer
U.S. Department of Homeland SecurityWashington, D.C. 20528
Subject: Advisory Note Concerning a Mechanism for Threat Advisory Messages
This note is on behalf of the Emergency Management Technical Committee (EMTC) ofthe Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS). The intent is to offer advice on a matter of interest to the OASIS EM TC, andto offer expert assistance in this matter if that might be useful.
The matter concerns an important technical detail associated with the Homeland Security Advisory System (HSAS). A member of the OASIS EM TC brought to our attention that the Department of Homeland Security recently created a mechanism for Web sites to automatically obtain the current HSAS threat advisory level. The mechanism delivers a message, formatted using eXtensible Markup Language (XML), as in the following sample for HSAS level red: .
The message format in this mechanism implies that receivers would rely on other mechanisms to establish context for the message, e.g., Who published it, Who was its intended audience, When was it published, What was the urgency of its delivery, etc. TheOASIS EM TC would like to suggest that this mechanism could be improved by including such contextual information within the message itself, and to propose a format for doing so.
A subcommittee of the OASIS EM TC has recently begun work on standard mechanisms for notifications in the area of emergency management. A starting point for that effort is contributed work known as the Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) < HYPERLINK "http://www.incident.com/cap/" http://www.incident.com/cap/ >. The current CAP draft specification reflects guidance from the National Science and Technology Council and the Partnership for Public Warning. It has been incorporated in the latest version of the Justice XML Data Model < HYPERLINK "http://it.ojp.gov/topic.jsp?topic_id=43" http://it.ojp.gov/topic.jsp?topic_id=43> and implemented in field trials in Virgina and California.
If the DHS mechanism for communicating the HSAS level to Web sites were to follow CAP guidelines, each HSAS message would include the useful contextual information. An example appears below. The CAP format also offers, but does not require, a variety of options for future refinement of the HSAS presentation and delivery procedures.
The additional information elements following the CAP recommendation would simplify the processing of HSAS messages, and they would allow HSAS messages to be intermixed with a wide variety of other emergency management notification messages.
The Notification Methods and Messages Subcommittee and the OASIS EM TC itself stand ready to assist the Department of Homeland Security in this matter, or any other matter related to the work of the Technical Committee. Please feel free to have appropriate staff contact Art Botterell via email at .
Sincerely,
R. ALLEN WYKE, Chairman
OASIS Emergency Management XML Committee
EXAMPLE OF AN HSAS UPDATE IN CAP FORMAT
43b08071-3727-41b4-acb3-80b912387c6a
U.S. Federal Government, Department of Homeland Security
2003-04-02T14:39:01-05:00
Actual
Public
Alert
en-US
Security
Homeland Security Advisory System
Forecast
Severe
High
http://www.dhs.gov/dhspublic/display?theme=29
http://www.dhs.gov/dhspublic/getAdvisoryImage
HSAS=red
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