XML Consortium Announces Emergency-Response Specs

The draft Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) announced by the technical committee of the Emergency Management XML Consortium (EM-XML) is intended to establish a format for data interchange among local, regional and national warning and hazard alert systems. Information collected would then be forwarded to appropriate warning and emergency-response institutions, the organization said.

The EM-XML initiative was sparked by the ongoing need for smooth intercommunications among disparate emergency management systems and institutions since the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks--and the ongoing failure for various bodies to arrive at a commonly or even broadly accepted standard for such communications.

"Even now, sending an alert to three different organizations could require three different applications," said Allen Wyke, CTO of crisis management software maker Blue292 and chairman of the CAP technical committee. "The challenge is that there are a lot different efforts, true standards and de facto standards."

The current draft addresses both core and metadata needs underlying a common XML Schema interoperability standard, and seeks to establish a standards-base that conforms to XML structures, data types, syntax and rules, as well as being compatible with RDF, XHTML, SOAP and WSDL standards and protocols.

EM-XML was formed in October, 2002, with the CAP technical specifications committee coming together in February of this year, quickly focusing on generating a draft of the standards.

"This project struck us not only as something that needed to be done, but a great candidate to actually get something out and under review, not just talked about," Wyke said.

The committee's membership is a mix of both public and private sector experience, a fact that Wyke credited with broadening the group's perspective. Among the tech committee's approximately three dozen members are representatives from Unisys, Verisign, Oracle, Boeing, Wells Fargo, Los Angeles County, the U.S. Department of the Interior, OpenGIS Consortium and the Partnership for Public Warning among others.

"The fact that there isn't a single overall vision for how to approach this makes it important for each group to be judicious in working with each other and not letting political boundaries get in the way of technical and national needs," he said.

Seeking to overcome or avoid the variances, the EM-XML team sought both open communication with other working groups, focusing on gaps in their approaches rather than duplicating work already done. Crucially, in Wyke's view, the EM-XML group pursued its own draft within the framework mandated by Oasis XML standards consortium.

"Oasis provides a very specific, rigorous path to ratification as a full standard," Wyke said. The draft result of the committee's work is posted on the Oasis Web site.

Pending final review, the CAP specification was expected be released to the public in the next few weeks for comment. The public review period was expected to last 30 to 45 days, following which the specifications would to be submitted to Oasis for final ratification.

This story courtesy of TechWeb.