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The International Telecommunications Union - Disaster
(ITU-D) conducted workshop
in Thailand, introduced the utility of the Common Alerting Protocol
(CAP) standard,
to the delegates, through a the Sahana CAP-enabled software and a
series of hands-on exercises. The CAP ease-of-use and utility were
appreciated by those delegates. Participants experienced the
efficiency gains of the single entry of a message being
simultaneously disseminated through multiple technologies to multiple
recipients, acknowledged the CAP message consistency removing
ambiguity that may, otherwise, lead to false responses, and realized
the capabilities of brokering multi-agency publishers and subscribers
for improved situational-awareness.
ITU-D hosted a session on the topic: “Introduction to
Operationalizing the Common Alerting Protocol”
at the workshop: “Use of Telecommunications/ICT for Disaster
Management1”.
This hands-on CAP session was resourceful in producing positive
outcomes. Delegates had the opportunity to assess the capabilities of
the standard using the CAP-enabled Sahana broker software.
Click to view the workshop report available on the web and the slide deck .
Evidence points to the growing need for a CAP-enabled
ITU-D Module (CAP-ITUM).
The CAP-ITUM would foster the wider-scale adoption of the the CAP
standard and the policies it offers. The ITU branded module would
advance the member states, lagging in implementing CAP, with
facilitating multi-agency all-hazards all-media warning, alerting,
and situational-awareness capabilities, to effectively coordinate
hazard events. Since the first release of CAP in 2005, only a handful
of member states: North America, Australia, and Germany have adopted
the standard. Sri Lanka, an early adopter, has carried out several
research projects involving the standard but has not progressed
beyond with institutionalizing it at a National level. Other member
states have failed to realize the full potential of CAP beyond simply
accepting as an interoperable XML schema.