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

Hannes:

As Art says, CAP's incident list is very general.  To further Art's point,
when it came to the development of what became the OASIS EDXL Distribution
Element (DE), we faced the same issue as a primary purpose of the DE is
routing messages by incident type.  The CAP categories were far too broad
for that.  

So the draft requirements and specification for the DE developed by the
cross emergency domain practitioner working group developed a detailed list
of incident types for submission to the OASIS EMTC as part of its request
for the development of that standard.

The EMTC wisely rejected our suggestion, thinking that (1) the work to
create a shared incident type taxomony should be done for the US and other
countries, but hadn't been done yet, and (2) such lists of incident types
would likely change more frequently than the standard.  

So they adopted a flexible solution of "Managed Lists" for this and similar
list issues (e.g. roles).   Under this approach values such as incident
names appear in the standard, along with the name of the managed list you
are using.  If there is only one Managed List for that topic in the world,
great, but if there are several you can still communicate because you know
which list is being used.  

The absence of both initial managed lists and a repository for their
locations is an identified gap that hopefully will be addressed soon.  A
number of us developed a project to do Managed Lists for incident names and
roles, but other priorities have gotten in the way.

David K. Aylward, President
COMCARE Emergency Response Technology Group
1351 Independence Court, SE
Washington, DC 20003
202.255.3215 (mobile)
202.295.0136 (office)
202.521.4047 (fax)
daylward@comcare.org

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-----Original Message-----
From: cap-list-bounces@lists.incident.com
[mailto:cap-list-bounces@lists.incident.com] On Behalf Of Art Botterell
Sent: Sunday, July 12, 2009 11:52 AM
To: cap-list@incident.com; earlywarning@ietf.org
Subject: Re: [CAP] Definition of Warning Categories

On Jul 12, 2009, at 7/12/09 3:58 AM, Hannes Tschofenig wrote:
> I was wondering whether there is somewhere a more verbose / more  
> complete
> description of the semantic of the individual values.

No, and that's deliberate.  Considering the high levels of uncertainty  
that so often surround emergent events, the CAP designers (first in  
the CAP Working Group and later within OASIS) struggled to balance  
completeness against specificity.  There was also a concern that we  
could get bogged down in trying to perfect the taxonomies and wind up  
with no standard at all.

So the definitions were deliberately left somewhat open-ended and  
contextual... some would go so far as to say "vague" and I, for one,  
wouldn't argue.

- Art

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