CAP Visualization (was RE: CAP Developers' Forum...)

[Art Botterell <acb@incident.com>]

Kon -

The idea of visualizing aggregate CAP traffic is an interesting one. 
The <references> and <incidents> fields provide a mechanism for 
associating multiple messages in a graph... provided that the 
originator provides them, or that some reliable mechanism can be 
devised for inferring such relationships after the fact.  As is so 
often the case, the holdup appears to be at the input.

(Of course, relationships could be built on the basis of sender, 
event category or whatever, but it seems like in most cases the 
result would be a simple set that might not be very interesting 
visually, except perhaps when displayed geographically.)

As for mapping, I've done a couple of demos plotting CAP location 
data over a map... I used an open-source platform called OpenMap that 
reads various formats including ESRI shape files, but a commercial 
GIS would work as well if not better.  The ComCARE team (in 
particular, a company called GeoDecisions out of Pennsylvania) has 
also done CAP plots in a web mapping service.

The CAP <polygon> tag, in particular, is derived from GML, so 
GML-aware platforms should be able to use it pretty directly... 
although extracting the points and constructing a new shape is pretty 
easy.  <geocode> values require the use of polygon lookup tables... 
easy in the case of well-known areas like ZIP codes or county (FIPS) 
boundaries... less so in the case of system-specific zones that may 
not be familiar to all recipients.

- Art


At 11:17 AM -0700 5/19/04, Kon Wilms wrote:
>A few questions for other implementers:
>
>1. Is anyone else working on data visualization of mass amounts of CAP
>alerts (such as treemaps, hyperbolic graphs, spatial trees, or such)?
>
>2. I would be interested to hear from the GIS folks as to what formats
>they are using for vector data importing/plotting. If no-one is
>implementing GIS as part of an application, are there any guidelines for
>supporting GIS file formats in CAP reception/parsing (or do we need
>some)?
>
>Cheers
>Kon
>