Re: [earlywarning] [CAP] Definition of Warning Categories

[Art Botterell <acb at incident.com>]

I'm wondering whether it might be simpler, at least in the near term,  
to let consumers subscribe to selected sources rather than to topical  
categories.  That pushes the question of message authoritativeness /  
jurisdiction  /credibility out of the CAP infrastructure and into the  
larger field of inter-agency and inter-jurisidictional coordination,  
where it more properly belongs.

Taxonomies tend to be culturally loaded and can never be guaranteed to  
be complete.  Thus there's a real risk of "categorical disconnects"  
leading to missed alerts either because of differing interpretations  
of categories or of unforeseen events that don't fit our preconceived  
categories.  Maybe someday we'll have a reliable taxonomy of the  
unexpected, but right now a degree of deliberate imprecision seems to  
be the best we can do... and I sometimes wonder whether even that is  
more helpful than it is risky.

- Art


On Jul 12, 2009, at 7/12/09 11:58 AM, Hannes Tschofenig wrote:

> I should provide a bit more feedback about the background to my  
> question.
>
> If you only set the value in the category field for the purpose of  
> human
> consumption then there is not really an interoperability issue.
>
> Now, with the work on http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-rosen-sipping-cap-03
> we wanted to define an event package for SIP that allows you to  
> "subscribe"
> to certain type of events: you might indicate something like  
> location and
> the type of events you are interested in.
>
> Now, the semantic of the category field suddently matters. With the
> individuals-to-citizen emergency services we tried to come up with a
> description of the emergency services categories, see RFC 5031.
>
> Ciao
> Hannes