ITU Gives Preliminary Nod to OASIS Common Alerting Protocol
GENEVA -- ITU gave a preliminary nod to the OASIS Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) and developed a module for systems to aid transmission over cramped networks, an official here said. OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards) will consider the move before ITU forwards the decisions to administrations for final approval, an official said.
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One ITU version of CAP is “fully equivalent to OASIS CAP 1.1,” ITU documents said. A 2nd includes an ASN.1 (Abstract Syntax Notation number One) module, which significantly speeds delivery and increases the flexibility of emergency warning messages, said Tony Rutkowski, vp-regulatory affairs and standards at VeriSign, speaking as acting chmn of the group that weighed the specs. The CAP spec came to ITU after an Oct. workshop on emergency communications (CD Oct 23 p9).
Some local police departments have so-called reverse 911 systems that can call everyone in a region, Rutkowski said: “It seems to me this would be a comparable capability.” It doesn’t scale well for sending millions of messages over a large area, but “if it’s confined to a relatively small area like the Virginia Tech/Blacksburg area, it might be a doable implementation,” Rutkowski said: “I would suspect after this is all over there will be some significant inquiries -- if they''re already aren’t significant inquiries -- into what can be provided.”
OASIS’s CAP is basically an XML way to describe a significant event, Rutkowski said: “It was done mainly for emergency kinds of events, but it could describe almost anything.” The spec includes a time stamp, a location element and a structured way of describing what’s occurring including options for messages and multimedia, he said: “It’s sort of irrespective of any underlying protocols and services.” Providers worried that XML-based CAP was too big, and “since they do a lot of their stuff in ASN.1 and use H.323” they saw it as a potential hurdle because it wasn’t compatible with their systems, said Rutkowski. He thinks industry and govt. groups in Washington quickly will look at whether the ASN.1 version can deliver messages directly to end users.
Officials involved with H.323 at ITU took an interest in the CAP spec -- but the H.323 protocol can’t accept all the XML tags, so they converted it to ASN.1 syntax, then “ran the module through compilers to make sure there were no errors,” Rutkowski said. ASN.1 describes messages over fixed and resource-constrained networks, such as wireless, the ASN.1 Information website said. It “would fit quite nicely into an H.323 signaling packet, so you can… send it out directly to terminals,” Rutkowski said.
“The fact that you're able to completely implement a CAP spec in 40% the size, makes it much more efficient and gets you over thresholds that would otherwise prevent delivery for almost every service, whether it’s wireless, wireline or broadcast, or Internet,” Rutkowski said.
The specs, approved preliminarily Fri., will be sent to administrations for final review pending OASIS’s signing off on the ITU-equivalent and the ASN.1 module. OASIS may decide to fast-track consideration or require longer public review, Rutkowski said. OASIS called it premature to comment on the ASN.1 module until it has had a chance to look it over. The ITU action responded to administrations’ instructions during a Nov. policy-making conference, Rutkowski said.