"Effective Disaster Warnings"
Report by the Working Group on Natural Disaster Information Systems
Subcommittee on Natural Disaster Reduction
Committee on Environment and Natural Resources
National Science and Technology Council
November 2000

This statement led to the development of  the Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) an open, non-proprietary standard data interchange format that can be used to collect all types of hazard warnings and reports locally, regionally and nationally, for input into a wide range of information-management and warning dissemination systems. 
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The Common Alerting Protocol will benefit a) the public, b) public agencies and private concerns (such as industrial plant operators) with warning responsibilities, and c) developers of new sensor, threat-evaluation and warning-dissemination technologies:

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During 2001 and 2002 the ad-hoc Working Group of more than 130 emergency-management practitioners, technologists and academic experts developed and refined a draft specification for the CAP alert message.

In 2003 the national non-profit Partnership for Public Warning endorsed the CAP effort and sponsored its submission to the OASIS XML standards process.

The OASIS Emergency Management XML Technical Committee has accepted the contribution of the CAP draft standard and is now conducting a rigorous technical and operational review and refinement of the design in its Notification Methods and Messages Subcommittee.

Follow the link to the CAP home page:- goto