Re: [earlywarning] [CAP] Definition of Warning Categories

[Art Botterell <[e-mail]>]

On Wed, Jul 15, 2009 at 9:44 AM, <[e-mail]> wrote:

> CAP was originally developed based primarily on US requirements and as
> such may not reflect non-US regional considerations, policies, etc.


Um... I'm not sure that's entirely correct.  The basis of the CAP design was
social science research on warning message effectiveness, and both that body
of research and the membership of the original CAP Working Group were quite
international.

It's true that a lot of the application of CAP has taken place in the U.S.,
and that's a constant concern.  However, we've managed to keep CAP
international enough that the ITU was able to endorse it (as recommendation
x.1303).

Profiles, as long at they're truly profiles (which is to say, strict subsets
of the CAP specification) enable different communities to define local
usages without breaking basic compatibility with other CAP implementations.
Again, it's been a struggle sometimes to prevent profiles from becoming
localized extensions of the standard, which wouldn't be interoperable, but I
think we've done reasonably well so far.

I'd also suggest that it may be confusing to talk about CAP in the same
breath with GeoRSS or Atom.  CAP is a content structure, while RSS and Atom
are indexing schemes that themselves refer to other content, including
sometimes CAP.

- Art