MHonArc v2.5.0b2 -->
emergency message
[Date Prev]
| [Thread Prev]
| [Thread Next]
| [Date Next]
--
[Date Index]
| [Thread Index]
| [List Home]
Subject: Re: [emergency] NOAA Undermining International Standards?
On Jun 1, 2006, at 6/1/06 6:12 AM, Rex Brooks wrote:
> Thanks for the heads up, Art, Can you provide the specific parts
> of CAP that are not being implemented?
Rex -
What's really tragic here is that the problem would be trivial if it
didn't have such lethal potential.
First off, let me stress that my concern is NOT with the various NOAA/
Battelle requirements that certain CAP-optional elements be treated
as mandatory. (E.g., while one might debate the wisdom of mandating
use of the legacy SAME coding on such a massive scale... thus
perpetuating SAME's obsolescent and inflexible geographic targeting
and slowing the move to true geospatial/location-based alerting...
it's still a legitimate "profile" requirement in terms of the CAP
specification.)
But where HazCollect left the fold altogether was in their unilateral
choice not to support the CAP <instruction> element. Which means
that a well-formed CAP message, with the hazard description in
<description> and the safety instructions in <instruction>, would
lose a critical part of its meaning in transiting the HazCollect
network. Remove the sender's instructions from a message and people
could get killed.
The ostensible reason for this is that the existing Weather Radio and
EAS delivery systems are limited to two minutes of audio,
corresponding to something like 240 written words. The HazCollect
answer has been to truncate the <description> field at 240 words and
to ignore the content of the <instruction> element altogether.
Obviously it would be a simple matter to concatenate-and-trim (or
trim-and-concatenate) the two fields, but for some reason NOAA has
chosen consistently to make excuses ("not in the original design" /
"no money") instead of simply writing the requisite change order.
In delving into this with various NOAA and Battelle staff, an
underlying concern has surfaced... that the existing NOAA "weather
wire" teletype format makes no structural distinction between the
informational and "call to action" section of their messages. Why
this would matter one way or the other is unclear to me, except
possibly as reflecting a desire not to allow anything into HazCollect
that would make pre-existing systems look bad by comparison.
A subtle but crucial distinction is involved here, between providing
for compatibility with legacy systems and imposing the limits of
those legacy systems on future technologies. The OASIS Emergency
Management Technical Committee and its predecessor, the CAP Working
Group, both went to great pains in designing CAP to provide for back-
compatibility without sacrificing the design requirements we drew
from the social science research on how effective warning systems work.
But the real issue isn't a particular design choice, it's a policy
under which NOAA seems to be trying to rewrite the CAP specification
without consultation or formal process. That goes to the credibility
of the entire standards effort.
- Art
[Date Prev]
| [Thread Prev]
| [Thread Next]
| [Date Next]
--
[Date Index]
| [Thread Index]
| [List Home]