CAP was originally developed based primarily on US requirements and as
such may not reflect non-US regional considerations, policies, etc.
Um... I'm not sure that's entirely correct. The basis of the CAP design was social science research on warning message effectiveness, and both that body of research and the membership of the original CAP Working Group were quite international.
It's true that a lot of the application of CAP has taken place in the U.S., and that's a constant concern. However, we've managed to keep CAP international enough that the ITU was able to endorse it (as recommendation x.1303).
Profiles, as long at they're truly profiles (which is to say, strict subsets of the CAP specification) enable different communities to define local usages without breaking basic compatibility with other CAP implementations. Again, it's been a struggle sometimes to prevent profiles from becoming localized extensions of the standard, which wouldn't be interoperable, but I think we've done reasonably well so far.
I'd also suggest that it may be confusing to talk about CAP in the same breath with GeoRSS or Atom. CAP is a content structure, while RSS and Atom are indexing schemes that themselves refer to other content, including sometimes CAP.
- Art
