An open standard to save lives
When an emergency occurs, members of the public who are impacted need to be alerted quickly via as many different communications channels as possible to help save lives and protect property.
Emergency response organisations need to be able to share emergency information consistently and accurately so they can respond in the most effective way possible.
The Environment Agency is responsible for providing flood warning information to people at risk of flooding in England. We have been working with the Department for Digital, Media, Culture and Sport (DCMS), Cabinet Office (Civil Contingencies Secretariat) and the Government Digital Service (GDS) to put forward the Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) as the standard for emergency alerting messaging for the UK.
This work builds on the back of an original standards challenge from 2014 which was led by the UK Met Office. A number of queries were raised by the GDS Standards Board at that time which have now been resolved.
What is CAP?
The Common Alerting Protocol or CAP is an open XML based format to exchange emergency messaging between systems. It is a format which has been developed since the mid 2000’s but was initiated in 2000 when the US National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) produced a report in November 2000 on “Effective Disaster Warnings” with a recommendation that a “standard method should be developed to collect and relay instantaneously and automatically all types of hazard warnings and reports locally, regionally and nationally for input into a wide variety of dissemination systems.”
The OASIS Emergency Management Technical Committee has oversight of CAP and first published CAP v1.0 in 2004. This has subsequently been revised through this group with the latest CAP specification version 1.2 being published in July 2010.
Benefits of CAP
CAP provides a template for effective warning messages based on best practices demonstrated through academic research and experience from the organisations and users that have adopted it. The CAP format includes everything that’s needed to communicate what’s happening in an emergency for a variety of different users — from responders to the public. The format provides:
- A way to show the location(s) the emergency is affecting
- The ability to add real time information on the situation
- An indication on the urgency, severity and certainty associated with the emergency
- Confirmation that the originator is a valid source with end-to-end authentication and validation of messages
- References for further information such as URLs
- Multiple message types such as warnings, acknowledgements, expiration and cancellations, updates and amendments, administrative and system messages
- A mechanism to handle supplemental information such as image files
- Inclusion of multilingual information in a single message
The CAP 1.2 format also complements existing government open standards:
- Formatting dates and times in data
- Encoding characters
- Exchange of location point
- Tag content with international language codes
The CAP format has grown in popularity worldwide due to its open nature and inter-operable design, leading to a growth in emergency messaging systems in both the Government and private sector. It is a standard that has enabled the use of services such as Google Public Alerts and cell broadcast warning systems in a number of countries around the world.
A global standard
We already use CAP in the flood warning service in the UK— providing real time flooding information to users in England, including Google, who uses the feed in their Google Public Alerts service.
There are over 100 organisations worldwide also use CAP — the World Meteorological Organization holds a register of current users. These include organisations such as Deutscher Wetterdienst (Germany’s Met Office), FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) in the United States, Meteo-France, the UK Met Office and Brazil’s Instituto Nacional de Meteorologia to name several.
CAP has been adopted as a key component to drive public facing warning systems, notably those which are cell-broadcast based such as deployments in Canada, Chile, Japan, Lithuania, Netherlands, South Korea, Taiwan and the USA. In the development of the UK’s cell broadcast service, CAP is being proposed as the format which will enable successful transmission of emergency messages through the mobile networks to alert citizens in a particular location.
What next?
CAP meets the Open Standards Principles and facilitates a government wide standard for emergency alert messaging. By sharing emergency messages in a consistent way, authorities and individuals can better respond — saving lives and protecting livelihoods when the worst happens.
You can comment on the standards challenge here: https://github.com/alphagov/open-standards/issues/73
