[aprssig] How should CAP 1.2 standard Emergency Alerts from the Google.org Alert Hub project appear in a local APRS tactical picture ?

Steve AB3LT at RoseAndSteve.us
Wed Feb 1 14:52:35 EST 2012


For those who haven't yet seen it, Google.org (not .com) is building a
public alerting service to make it easy for people to find critical
emergency information during a crisis. They incorporate public alert
data from authoritative sources, currently  weather, public safety and
earthquake alerts from US National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration (NOAA), the National Weather Service, and the US
Geological Survey (USGS).

Their main (Map) page is http://www.google.org/publicalerts
FAQ http://support.google.com/publicalerts
Subscription HOWTO http://alert-hub.appspot.com/

Because the Alert Hub implements PubSubHubbub the Google service will
call-back on registered URL's with the alert contents. this will
eliminate the need for software which has to repeatedly poll (scrape)
for this information. Also, as new publishers of emergency information
come on-line with Google.org, alert feed subscribers shouldn't have to
do anything to benefit from the added information.

The alerts google processes adhere to the Common Alerting Protocol
(CAP 1.2) standard
http://docs.oasis-open.org/emergency/cap/v1.2/CAP-v1.2-os.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Alerting_Protocol


-- How should CAP 1.2 standard Emergency Alerts from the Google.org
Alert Hub project appear in a local APRS tactical picture ?


Other than the widely supported WX alerting format(s), does anyone
have any concepts, ideas or approaches  for converting CAP data into
APRS objects or bulletins ?

I'm sure amber alerts are on their todo list. Is there guidance on how
amber alerts could/should be passed to RF local HAMs on APRS ?

I understand that for US weather alerts this could duplicate much of
the existing weather server functionality, samesame for USGS
earthquakes. Personally, I am thinking about how to get this
information out to hams on RF, not building yet another way to push WX
alerts into or across firenet/APRS-IS. That said, there is definitely
a possibility for someone to jump in with a new CAP to firenet or
APRS-IS service.


73, AB3LT Steve




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