WMO Common Alerting Protocol Implementers Workshop Report

9 December 2008
Agenda Item 1: Organization Of The Workshop

The Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) Implementers Workshop convened in Geneva at the headquarters of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). The Workshop was organized by the WMO Information System (WIS) project office, in association with WMO Public Weather Service (PWS). The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) and the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) were co-sponsors of the Workshop.

The Workshop was a technical meeting among experts, conducted in English, without interpretation. The Agenda (as amended), the list of actual Participants, and contributed documents discussed in the Workshop are linked from the online Document Plan:
http://www.wmo.int/pages/prog/www/ISS/Meetings/WIS-CAP_Geneva2008/DocPlan.html

The Workshop began with welcoming statements from the three sponsors. First to address the participants was the Deputy Secretary General of WMO, Hong Yan. The second welcoming statement was by video from Malcolm Johnson, Director of Standardization at ITU. The third welcoming statement, also by video, was given by Laurent Liscia, Executive Director of OASIS.

All three welcoming statements emphasized the need for international cooperation regarding emergency hazard warnings and disasters, giving priority to the needs of the less advantaged countries. They drew attention to the desirability of internationally agreed standards to enable well coordinated response in emergencies to disasters. The lack of standards increases the risk of danger and fatalities. All noted the value of CAP (an OASIS standard adopted as ITU-T Recommendation X.1303) and called for its expeditious implementation in societies world-wide to make for a safer world.

Agenda Item 2: Keynote Speech

Jean-Michel Rainer, Acting Director of WMO Information System (WIS), delivered the Keynote speech. He stated that the 188 Member countries and territories of WMO are recognizing that adoption of CAP can be an effective way to ensure that their alerts and warnings are easily integrated into emergency management systems and media. He quoted a recent request of WMO Congress and its Executive Council to pursue as a matter of urgency "...improving exchange of high priority data and products in support of a virtual all hazards network" within WIS.

Jean-Michel showed how coordination occurs among a world-wide array of observing systems, telecommunication facilities, and data processing and forecasting centres, owned and operated by WMO Members. He emphasized that National Meteorological and Hydrological Services have the lead role in global systems for observing, analyzing and warning of natural hazard threats. He explained how the WMO Global Telecommunications System (GTS), a private dedicated network, links all WMO Members, communicating alerts as well as data and forecasts. Assurance of the authority and authenticity of alerts is needed on the public Internet as well. Here, he expressed appreciation for the 2006 Workshop announcement that authoritative, authenticated alerts in CAP format by any official source worldwide can be disseminated over the Internet at no charge.

Given that weather and water-related hazard events account for 90% of natural disasters, the weather communications infrastructure is often leveraged for other alerting. Jean-Michel noted that WMO alerting functions are not limited to weather hazards, and the WMO infrastructure can support the broadest range of hazards, as envisioned within the CAP standard. He also noted that we look forward to the printing and broad distribution of the guidelines document concerning CAP implementation in developing nations approved by the ITU Development Sector in 2007.

Agenda Item 3: Report Of Previous ITU/OASIS Workshop

Carol Cosgrove-Sacks of OASIS presented highlights and action items from the 2006 workshop on Advances in ICT Standards for Public Warnings, organized jointly between OASIS and ITU-T. Links to the reports and the presentations from that Workshop are given in the Document Plan noted above.

Agenda Item 4: Status Reports on CAP Implementations

4.1 OASIS / Emergency Management Technical Committee
Elysa Jones, Chair of the OASIS Emergency Management Technical Committee (EM TC), presented information on OASIS work regarding emergency management. She stressed the importance of getting the messages out in times of emergency and said that CAP is a fundamental advance. She described additional standards for distribution of messages, resource availability, and digital messaging, being developed by the EM TC. She said that promotion of best practices regarding the use of CAP is increasingly important to promote adoption and implementation of CAP. She drew attention to very useful developments in the U.S. that promote adoption of CAP. She noted two major implementations: the CAP-compliant Integrated Public Alert and Warning System and the CAP-compliant National Incident Management System. She also noted that the FCC is updating the national Emergency Alert System, and will require CAP-based public warning by wireless communications and other service providers.

4.2 WMO / Public Weather Service and Disaster Risk Reduction
Haleh Kootlval presented an overview of the WMO Public Weather Services program with regard to disseminating weather related messages and warnings to the very diverse set of users world wide. She emphasized that the major challenge is to communicate the warnings in the most effective way to the general public, and that these warnings must be easily accessible and understandable everywhere, so that people will react by taking the necessary measures to protect themselves and their community. She noted that there is a growing awareness of links between weather warnings and health information. She stressed that CAP will help the world move beyond its current patchwork of systems and she pointed to the examples of MeteoAlarm and the Severe Weather Information Centre (SWIC) as potential warning systems to generate alerts using CAP as a way to make alerts more coherent across borders.

Jim Douris gave a presentation on how WMO programs support Disaster Risk Reduction. He noted that successful disaster risk management should be supported by effective governance, legislation, legal frameworks and institutional capacities at national to local levels, supplemented by effective information and knowledge sharing mechanisms among different stakeholders. He said that early warning systems are an integral part of disaster risk management. He said that the WMO, under the crosscutting framework of the Disaster Risk Reduction Programme and in collaboration with key partners (e.g. UN ISDR, The World Bank, Red Cross, and other key stakeholders) have initiated two Multi-hazard Early Warning System projects in Shanghai and Central America (to be launched in 2009) and is planning to initiate projects in Southeastern Europe, Southeastern Africa, South and Southeastern Asia. He said that these projects potentially provide a platform for the demonstration and adoption of CAP.

4.3 ITU work in emergency telecomm and implementations of CAP
Richard Hill of ITU-T explained the role of ITU in: promoting standardization in communications, including regulatory issues, standards development and adoption; the use of different modes (telecommunication, radio, satellite); and its work with other organizations. In disaster alerting, ITU is relevant to: Alerting of central/regional/local authorities responsible for warning the public (broadcasting, fixed, mobile, fixed/mobile satellite systems); Issuance of warnings to the people likely to be affected; Broadcasting (sound and television); Mobile (such as TV, Radio, SMS / Cell broadcasting). He also noted that all ITU-T Recommendation documents are now available for free.

Richard reported that ITU-T has developed guidelines for harmonizing the emergency number among public telecommunications networks. He pointed out that this is a messy situation, particularly for travelers, as different countries have assigned different numbers for reporting of emergencies. He also explained a new recommendation developed by ITU: ICE (In Case of Emergency). ICE is a scheme for mobile phone users to tag certain numbers in their phone contact list: simply prefix selected contact names with a two digit number. According to the ICE practice, anyone looking at a phone contact list and seeing a prefix of "01" would know that contact is the phone owner's primary contact in case of emergency. The number prefix "02" designates a secondary contact in case of emergency, and so on.

4.4 European Commission (focus on REACT)
Massimo Cristaldi presented information on a European Union project, REACT. (The name "REACT" expands to "Reaction to Emergency Alerts using voice and Clustering Technologies".) Implemented among Command and Control centres, REACT features voice recognition to ease language and other communications problems. It also uses clustering analysis and TSO (Tactical Situation Object) dictionaries to aid in the prediction of incident severity. Massimo focused on how the project uses CAP to deal with situations where emergency services are highly fragmented, especially where multiple languages are in common use. In Italy, CAP is being developed to promote more coordination, not only for the firefighters but 10 other emergency services. He demonstrated how CAP can be used in very practical ways to improve coordination between emergency services. In addition to CAP, the REACT system uses TSO for the quick identification and exchange of incoming calls and incidents. The ultimate goal of the project is to help realize an interoperable European emergency information infrastructure.

4.5 MeteoAlarm, a project of the European Meteorological Organizations (EUMETNET)
Michael Staudinger presented information about MeteoAlarm, a project of EUMETNET. He explained how responses to weather warning in Europe have developed and some of the challenges in communicating weather risks with actionable advice to people, especially tourists. Forecasting plays a critical role, together with clearly coded information. MeteoAlarm now works in 28 languages and the website attracts more than 12million hits per day. Among the objectives of MeteoAlarm is to integrate with the WMO SWIC in Hong Kong. Michael also called attention to planned future activities which includes support of CAP. He showed an example prepared by Deutsche Wetterdienst (DWD) illustrating how the current MeteoAlarm message format in XML can be used to generate CAP alerts automatically.

4.6 Integrated Risk Management for Africa (IRMA)
Ingo Simonis explained the vision of Integrated Risk Management for Africa. This involves building an ICT-based multi-risk platform, based on open source tools and open standards. He said that fire alerting and flood alerting are major features of IRMA as the project tries to use the results of EU research programmes with adaptations for the African context. He noted in general the challenges of very limited infra-structure, including the lack of quality data sets, only low level access to internet and other telecommunications networks, and unreliable energy supply. For cultural reasons, people may not believe warnings, and cross-border information exchange is limited. Consequently, it is quite difficult to communicate to remote populations, especially as there are 26 local languages in the area. Given these constraints, he suggested that radio based systems are probably best, but these still present challenges. The major satellite companies are ready to help, although access and credibility are key constraints.

4.7 Japan Meteorological Agency
Yuichi Yamakoshi described a Japan Meteorological Agency project that has developed XML formats for warnings. The core focus has been earthquake related warnings and possible tsunamis for urban centres of high population. Japan has a highly developed ICT infrastructure and almost total mobile phone coverage. He said the project is using XML because of its ease for format conversions, its uniform and flexible formats, and its general availability as a cost-effective approach. In comparing the JMA XML format project with CAP, he noted similarities in: purpose (distribution of disaster prevention information), target situations (all natural hazards, although JMA's project does not address human-induced events), and information content (user requirements for information to be compartmentalized and quantified). Because JMA's project is based on a data dictionary, he said it is simple to reuse and extend the basic information elements and so it is possible for JMA to support CAP. He noted that very detailed observations and forecasts cannot be expressed with CAP as they involve many quantitative estimates and time-sequential values. But, he asserted that the essence of JMA’s warnings is expressible with CAP, including torrential rain, flooding, storm surges, earthquakes and volcanic eruptions.

4.8 Meteorological Service of Canada
Norm Paulsen of Environment Canada reported on development of Canada's National Public Alerting System (NPAS), which is based on CAP and involves government at all levels. All parties to NPAS use the Canadian Profile of CAP, which also links to U.S. usage. The Canadian system requires all text in two languages (English and French), and Environment Canada has written Guidelines for public alerts. He estimated that there will be around 100,000 alerts a year, of which some 250 warn of events that are critical and life threatening. There was also some discussion related to cell broadcasting in Canada. Norm gave the Web address for Canada's CAP messages ( http://www.alerting.ca/cap ) but he noted that access will require that you contact him by e-mail ( Norm.Paulsen@ec.gc.ca ).

4.9 Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute (SMHI)
Magnus Runesson explained the goal of the Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute to build a web 2.0 alerting system that is CAP compliant and easily accessed by the population. (An abstract was provided in addition to the presentation.) In the Swedish experience, CAP can cover most situations, although parts of CAP are not using XML as well as they could, e.g., the language tag is ambiguous. He also expressed his view that there is a need for a common meteorological coding or profile of CAP.

4.10 United States Geological Survey (USGS)
Jim Devine explained that the U.S. Geological Survey was an early adopter of CAP and that issuance of CAP alerts alongside of its traditional alerts is a routine part of operations. He emphasized the importance of CAP in the USGS mission, especially earthquake reporting/information systems, landslides, and volcano alerts, including volcanic ash. He also noted that USGS is moving into alerts for biological hazards, including wildlife disease such as avian flu. Jim did point out that USGS collects a lot of other data, e.g. stream and river heights, but is not itself responsible for issuing alerts in that area. Similarly, USGS does not issue fire alerts, although it has relevant information from its observation systems.

4.11 United States National Weather Service (NWS)
Ron Jones explained the roles of the United States National Weather Service in issuing severe weather warnings/advisories. NWS is under huge pressure for more information and more specific information, and began migrating to CAP version 1.0 in 2004. On behalf of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), NWS supports the HazCollect Project, integrating externally generated messages into the NWS datastream, internet alerting, and weather broadcasts. In 2008, NWS developed its CAP version 1.1 with public comments. More flexible and usable on individual web browsers, CAP version 1.1 will replace CAP version 1.0 at NWS by December 2009.

Agenda Item 5: Demonstrations Of Technology And Best Practices

5.1 Poster cancelled (absence of scheduled presenter)
5.2 Blackboard Connect
Billy Pitts introduced Blackboard Connect. He explained that the company offers a platform that initiates time-sensitive messages on behalf of over 24,000 active sites in 48 of the 50 United States. He also noted that Blackboard Inc. has clients in over 80 countries and corporate offices in Vancouver, Amsterdam, Beijing, and Sydney. He emphasized that CAP implementations suffer from the lack of a public education campaign that would make the case for CAP readily understandable. Billy also offered copies of a letter he had sent to the EM TC concerning certain suggested enhancements to the next version of the CAP standard.

5.3 CellCast Technologies
Bruno Walter introduced CellCast Technologies, a company that uses cell broadcasting, which instantly delivers a short text message to large numbers of cellular phones specific to a geographical area. He explained that cell broadcasting is already built into most of the world's 3 billion cell phones and can be enabled with a setting change or minor hardware/software upgrade. He noted that cell broadcasting works despite voice and text messaging congestion. Receivers are assured of message authenticity because sending is limited to authorized officials. Bruno said that cell broadcasting is operational now in South Korea, the Netherlands, Wisconsin (USA), Turkey, and India.

Mark Woods used the opportunity to also introduce some concerns about harmonization of Cell Broadcasting message identifiers for the purpose of emergency alerting and for civic purposes (see topic 5.11 below).

5.4 European Commission
This demonstration of the EU project REACT was introduced by Massimo Cristaldi under agenda item 4, Status Reports on CAP Implementations (see topic 4.4 above).

5.5 Environment Canada
This demonstration of practice using CAP was introduced by Norm Paulsen under agenda item 4, Status Reports on CAP Implementations (see topic 4.8 above). It presented issues also addressed under agenda item 7, Key Issues for Intermediaries.

5.6 ESRI (Environmental Systems Research Institute)
Anak Agung explained the use of ESRI's ArcGIS for Authoring, Serving, and Consuming CAP. He said that geography is almost always essential to an alert. Accordingly, GIS (geographic information systems) can help to: refine geographic definition in an alert, support the workflow of generating CAP alerts, and leverage CAP alert information for analysis. His demonstrations included authoring CAP with ArcGIS Mobile, and consuming and relaying CAP with FeedServer.

5.7 Google
Phil Dixon introduced what he is thinking about doing within a new unit in Google called "Kipendo". He said the team is getting organized and building various relationships. He plans to advocate a "disaster layer" in Google Earth but has issues yet to be resolved.

5.8 Space Curve
Andrew Rogers introduced Space Curve and its work relevant to CAP. He emphasized that global-scale emergency management and warning demands resilient architectures supporting: interoperability (diversified and survivable communications mechanisms), scalability (distributed server infrastructure that can scale to peak loads while applying alerting policies in near real-time), and integrity (pervasive integrity checks, authentication, and resistance to denial of service attacks). In support of interoperability, SpaceCurve will offer open source licensing of its customizable Java implementation of the CAP v1.1 standard. Although "presentation layer agnostic", client and visualization tools and library add-ons enable integration with client environments like Google Earth. For scalability, SpaceCurve uses a new kind of distributable database that allows CAP publishers to directly publish into a contiguous, global-scale aggregation system while maintaining control of their data. To ensure integrity, there are extensive built in conformance validation and cryptographic authentication features.

5.10 Warning Systems Incorporated
Patrick Gannon introduced Warning Systems Incorporated (WSI), incorporated in 1991 to market tone alert radio receivers as part of emergency notification systems. The company supplies indoor warning receivers under the Chemical Stockpile Emergency Preparedness Program. WSI also designs and produces systems that activate outdoor sirens, pagers, two-tone radios, the U.S. Emergency Alert System (EAS), and Web-enabled radio frequency systems that are integrated using CAP. WSI is active in several emergency management and technical associations, and chairs the OASIS EM TC.

5.11 Demonstration cancelled (due to family circumstances of demonstrator)
5.12 Cell broadcast technical coordination
Mark Woods described an ongoing study in ITU-T Study Group 2 concerning the harmonization of Cell Broadcasting message identifiers for the purpose of emergency alerting and for civic purposes. He said that a draft ITU-T Recommendation had been developed that presents: a technology neutral approach, an initial allocation of Multicast addresses with an ITU body to administer subsequent allocations, and guidance on the use of the generic multicast addresses in various mobile technologies.

10 December 2008
Agenda Item 6: Hot Topics for Alerting Authorities

6.1 Best Practices for text in CAP description & instruction elements
Ron Jones introduced the topic of best practices for text in CAP description and instruction elements. The subsequent discussion focused on the challenges of using CAP in multiple languages. There was a suggestion that OASIS should investigate how to indicate which of multiple "alert/info" elements in a CAP message is primary in the case where some are secondary translations of the original message.

6.2 Making globally unique identifiers for CAP alerts
Andrew Rogers led a discussion about unique identifiers and why they will become more important when CAP is very broadly implemented. Techniques for assuring uniqueness were mentioned, such as fully qualified domain names. Andrew offered the idea of using a message hash, such as SHA, to provide a unique identifier for each message. It is not clear what are the requirements to be met, and it was pointed out that a long numeric identifier would be very difficult for humans to communicate verbally. Elysa Jones said that that no comments had so far raised this issue to the EM TC, but she undertook to follow up. Eliot Christian stressed that CAP alerts today are issued by only a few broad authorities which have avoided identifier collisions through their separate CAP Profiles and practices. There was consensus that a “white paper” on this issue would be of value.

6.3 Best practices for disseminating CAP alerts
Ron Jones introduced the topic of disseminating CAP alerts, stressing that most recipients of alerts want to get more than one warning notice before they act on the alert. He said that alerting authorities need to be aware that even a small change in practice by the originator may cause confusion in dissemination. Subsequent discussion focused on those alerts that are "broadcast intrusive", such as forced interruptions into radio or television programs, sirens, digital signs on highways, etc. Ron noted that, in the Washington D.C. area, text messages are considered most effective but there are also automated voice enunciators. It was recognized that many different channels have to be used and partnerships for dissemination are very important. He also said that mechanisms should be used to verify that a message actually went out.

6.4 Determining the standards compliance of a CAP implementation
Andrew Rogers led a discussion about determining the standards compliance of a CAP implementation. He noted that a wide variety of cases had been mentioned. While some aspects of the CAP standard leave room for interpretation, this latitude can be narrowed through profiles such as the Canadian profile of CAP and the U.S. EAS profile of CAP. Using commonly available tools, conformance of a CAP message to syntactic rules of a version of the base standard and applicable profile(s) can be validated (whether expressed in XML, ASN.1, or another format).
Yet, testing an implementation of the CAP standard and any of its profile subsets should address other aspects. Semantic issues surface in evaluating how well the implementation conforms to the commonly understood meanings of elements and attributes as given in the CAP data dictionary. Implementations should also be verified as to the correctness and reliability of the services that carry the CAP messages.
6.5 Use of CAP for disease surveillance
Nuwan Waidyanatha explained the basis of his research project on use of CAP for disease surveillance, which focused on early detection and notification of disease outbreaks. This detection and notification was based on analysis of health statistics and on mobile phone applications that send and receive health information among health workers and community hospitals. CAP will be used for instant alerts and for weekly epidemiological reports, with messages issued in multiple languages. Due to the scarcity of Internet in Sri Lanka, limited use of CAP and EDXL will be tested over mobile phones to reduce the delay time from many days to just minutes.
Nuwan listed several challenges and envisaged problems:

-Educating and engaging stakeholders about CAP and defining details for this health application of CAP;
-Identifying others that have adopted CAP for health alerts (know of only the USA CDC PHIN Commuication and Alerting Guide);
-Dilemma of frequent routine alerting affecting users to the point that they neglect priority alerts; and
-Designing effective alert messages from the perspective of human-computer interfaces, including for mobile handheld devices.

In subsequent discussion, Elysa Jones explained the added value of the EDXL family of standards that could be used to complement CAP.

Agenda Item 7: Key Issues For Intermediaries

7.1 Mechanisms to discover and validate CAP feeds
7.2 Having an internationally agreed list of authorities for common types of CAP alerts
Tom De Groeve led a discussion that combined topics 7.1 and 7.2: mechanisms to discover and validate CAP feeds, and having an internationally agreed list of authorities for common types of CAP alerts. He approached these topics from his experience in the international disaster and humanitarian response community. He reported that the UN GDACS system works well, offering alerts as an XML feed.
Elysa Jones noted that the EM TC had discussed registration and authentication issues in the context of sensors, wherein authority issues include sector and type of sensing, as well as geographic domain.

Tom raised the question of who could be recognized as an international registrar of authorities for common types of CAP alerts. Richard Hill noted that ITU often fulfills such a registration role.

7.3 Best Practices for Authenticating CAP alerts
Andrew Rogers led the discussion concerning best practices for authenticating CAP alerts In the case of official organizations using CAP when they issue alert messages, common practice is to use private and dedicated telecommunications methods having well-defined trust relationships (e.g., the WMO GTS). For an alerting authority to issue alert messages over the public Internet, it is important for message receivers to have an authentication method to ensure message integrity, such as certificates. This need could be addressed in the same way as the need for an internationally agreed list where receivers could verify which sources are authoritative for a certain type of alert in a particular jurisdiction. Certificates could also define a chain of custody as alert messages pass through intermediaries after official issuance.

Following up on the suggestion from Richard Hill, it was suggested that one of the members of ITU could propose that ITU take on the function of "root certificate authority". This authority then would delegate certificate issuance authority to official alerting organizations worldwide. Eliot Christian agreed to seek an ITU member who would make such a proposal.

7.4 Best Practices for Aggregating CAP alerts
Andrew Rogers led a discussion concerning best practices for aggregating CAP alerts He pointed out that polling techniques (e.g., RSS or Atom feeds) seem to be common practice for disseminating CAP alerts on the public Internet. He noted that this approach can result in high propagation latency under conditions of high server load, which is likely when a major disaster occurs. He said that active push messaging techniques (e.g. XMPP, email) offers good scaling but require smart, online clients. In contrast to these techniques that require an online presence, passive broadcast models (e.g., television and radio, satellite broadcasting, cell broadcasting) are proven and efficient. Broadcasting entails minimal distribution of infrastructure, although it is not appropriate to every case.

7.5 Multi-language CAP Brokers
Although participants were not able to view his presentation due to technical difficulties, Nuwan Waidyanatha explained his thinking about the need for a multi-language CAP broker. This is based on experiences in the HazInfo project, a hazard warning infrastructure project conducted in Sri Lanka after the 2004 tsunami. Messages were relayed to “the last mile” communities in the local language via telephony, Internet, and World Space satellite radio. Limitations of the terminal devices to receive complete CAP messages in local languages results in first-reSponders receiving the partial messages carrying out wrong emergency response actions. The CAP profile was used in English, Sinhala and Tamil but it was a challenge to translate some of the elements of a CAP message into the local languages.

7.6 CAP over GTS (WMO's Global Telecommunications System)
Simon Elliott explained the technique for sending CAP messages over GTS. He began by noting that EUMETSAT has a mission to support operational meteorological data and information products, and they use several mechanisms for dissemination: WMO GTS which has limited access, is highly controlled, and is well established; EUMETCast and GEONETCast which use Satellite DVB-S (direct video broadcast) to offer easy access to many users and almost global coverage; Website access; and, archive access.

With regard to CAP, Simon noted that Member states have requested monitoring of volcanic ash (necessary for alerting aircraft) and CAP has been demonstrated for volcanic ash alerts. Wrapping a CAP message with about 36 bytes of GTS routing information allows it to be carried over GTS in its original XML encoding. On receipt at its GTS destination, this wrapper is simply removed. The wrapper consists of a header and a trailer. The header is of the form: "\r\n\rnnn\r\r\n[ABH]\r\r\n" and the trailer is "\r\r\n", where ABH is the standardized GTS Abbreviated Bulletin Header.
Simon concluded by saying that the intrinsic standardization of CAP ensures syntactic and semantic interoperability of the data. He stated that CAP messages can supply the GTS community with information which can be understood and used in a variety of applications and disciplines.

7.7 The GEONETCast Alert Channel
Lothar Wolf described the GEONETCast Alert Channel and its support for disseminating CAP alerts. GEONETCast intends to support at least the nine "societal benefit areas" that are the focus of GEO (the Group on Earth Observations): disasters, health, energy, climate, water, weather, ecosystems, agriculture, and biodiversity. He stated that the GEONETCast has key features relevant for alerts: good timeliness and 24x7 availability, good access control, many users receive the same alert at the same time, reception stations are low cost, and alerts reach “low infrastructure” areas with little or no network availability. Lothar said that EUMETSAT will use CAP for some of its own products, such as the volcanic ash product described by Simon Elliott (see topic 7.6).

EUMETSAT will prototype the GEONETCast Alert Channel on EUMETCast (the EUMETSAT component of GEONETCast). Features of this GEONETCast Alert Channel include: dedicated bandwidth with the channel kept free of any other data than alerts; the channel will be set for high priority and immediate dissemination including data exchange among the GEONETCast partners; and monitoring will verify the reception of messages. This will achieve near real-time availability of CAP alerts simultaneously on the nearly global GEONETCast footprint. CAP alerts will also be available by subscription from a web portal.

Agenda Item 8: Clarifying Standards Work

8.1 Unique Identifiers for events
Tom De Groeve led the discussion of unique identifiers for events. He said that the GLIDE number (http://www.glidenumber.net) is useful as it does offer a global unique disaster identifier that can be used to correlate information. GLIDE can cover many different types of disasters, although some are difficult to define, e.g. floods over several frontiers. The GLIDE number is usually meaningful, not just a string of numbers/letters. Also, a GLIDE number is hierarchical and can use ISO country codes. It was pointed out that GLIDE numbers have to be generated, and so are not available instantly. The consensus of the discussion seemed to be that a unique event identifier might be a useful adjunct to CAP in some ways.

8.2 Use of sub-setting mechanisms (profiles, layers)
Norm Paulsen led a discussion on use of sub-setting mechanisms (profiles, layers. He stated that CAP is a technical standard, and such a standard can have proper subsets known as profiles (e.g., the Canadian and the EAS profiles of CAP). But, alerting itself may be seen as a kind of business and this leads to the need for a business standard as a further elaboration of the base standard or profile.

The discussion turned to the related topic concerning how to determine compliance of an implementation with a given standard or profile. Richard Hill noted that ITU is studying current requirements and possibilities regarding conformance testing (in which it had been involved in the past). Testing against profiles for CAP could be an example. Elysa Jones said that OASIS would be interested in more information on conformance, not only for CAP but for all OASIS standards. Elysa also mentioned the U.S. Supporting Technology Evaluation Program (STEP, http://www.nims.step.org ).

8.3 Best Practices for Updates and Cancels
Norm Paulsen introduced the discussion of best practices for updates and cancels. An alerting scenario was considered wherein the alerting authority intends to end the alert before its scheduled time of expiration. He said some alerting authorities may opt to use a CAP "cancel" message while others might opt to use a CAP "update" message. In discussing the most appropriate way to do this, it seems there are different concepts of the meaning of “cancel”, as that word is sometimes used to convey “disaster warning ended”. It does appear that agreed semantics should be clarified, and perhaps the OASIS EM TC should consider adding an “all clear” message in a future version of CAP.

8.4 Best practices for Area Blocks and Moving threat zones between updates
8.5 Best practices for Polygons, Preset Polygons, and Motion Vectors
Norm Paulsen combined the discussion of best practices for area blocks and moving threat zones between updates with the discussion of best practices for polygons, preset polygons, and motion vectors. As is the case with updates and cancels (see topic 8.3 above), CAP allows multiple ways to represent these kinds of evolving situations. Alerting authorities and intermediaries will therefore chose somewhat different representations, which of course can lead to confusion, under-alerting, and over-alerting. Some participants offered suggestions according to common current practice, such as using a motion vector for the forecasted track of a hurricane. It was also pointed out that use of polygons for alerting can interact in complex ways with areas of jurisdiction such as state or country borders.

8.6 Early Warning in the IETF
Hannes Tschofenig delivered a presentation titled "Early Warning in the IETF". He described work of the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) on distributing CAP messages via the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) event notification mechanism. In general remarks on CAP, he noted that some elements/attributes are flexible, leaving room for further interpretation. He said that more interoperability issues arise and more strictly defined semantics are necessary as there becomes more automatic processing between a larger number of entities. He noted also the importance of user interface aspects and striving to ensure that CAP profiles are backwards-compatible. He also pointed out that overuse of profiles will tend to dilute the degree of interoperability across CAP implementations.

Agenda Item 9: Key Issues For Future Action
9.1 Elysa Jones will ask the OASIS EM TC to consider certain suggested enhancements to the next version of the CAP standard contained in a letter from Blackboard Connect.
9.2 Elysa Jones will ask the OASIS EM TC to investigate how to indicate which of multiple "alert/info" elements in a CAP message is primary in the case where some are secondary translations of the original message.
9.3 Elysa Jones will ask the OASIS EM TC to explore the possibility of preparing a "white paper" on the topic of globally unique identifiers for CAP alerts.
9.4 Elysa Jones will ask the OASIS EM TC to address the need for clarity in the agreed semantics on Update and Cancel message types, and consider adding an “all clear” type in a future CAP version.
9.5 Eliot Christian will seek an ITU member to propose a "root certificate authority" for CAP alerts.
9.6 WIS staff will consult on request in support of: the planned future activity of MeteoAlarm to support CAP, the evaluation by Japan Meteorological Agency that CAP adoption would be straightforward, and the plans of EUMETSAT to prototype the GEONETCast Alert Channel on EUMETCast.
9.7 WIS staff will request the appropriate WMO organization to pursue a common meteorological coding or profile of CAP, raised by the Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute.
9.8 WMO agrees with the EUMETSAT assertion that CAP messages can supply the GTS community with information which can be understood and used in a variety of applications and disciplines. This will be pursued as part of the mandate on "...improving exchange of high priority data and products in support of a virtual all hazards network" within WIS.
9.9 WMO, ITU, and OASIS applaud the European Union in its efforts to realize an interoperable European emergency information infrastructure, and will take actions to assist on request.
9.10 Representatives of WMO, ITU, and OASIS will explore how to address the problem that CAP implementations suffer from the lack of a public education campaign that would make the case for CAP readily understandable.

Agenda Item 10: Drafting Session: Report Of Meeting
As agreed among the Workshop participants, the drafting session would consist of a session in plenary and follow-up discussions among participants via e-mail. Eliot Christian presented a high-level summary of the proceedings, working primarily from detailed notes taken over the two days by Carol Cosgrove-Sacks. For each topic within the first eight agenda items he briefly summarized the notes for that topic and then invited elaborations or corrections from all participants then present.
The revised notes from the plenary session on agenda item 10 became the basis for Eliot to prepare a draft Report of Meeting. This Report was sent by e-mail on 15 December to all participants, requesting that editing suggestions be sent to Eliot by midnight (UTC) 19 December.

Agenda Item 11: Closure Of The Workshop
The Workshop closed at 17:00 on 10 December 2008, except that the final Report of Meeting would be completed later by Eliot Christian using e-mail among the participants.