[CAP] CAP 1.0 advances to OASIS standard vote

[Art Botterell]

Friends -

This past week the OASIS Emergency Management Technical Committee 
finalized its CAP 1.0 specification and submitted it for adoption as 
a full-fledged OASIS standard.  This is the culmination of nearly a 
year of committee work, a number of public reviews and demonstrations 
of CAP-enabled applications, as well as the formal public-comment 
process a number of you participated in late last year.

A copy of the latest document... dated 2/10/2004 and designated a 
"committee draft"... is available on the project website at:
<http://www.incident.com/cap/docs/CAP_1.0/emergency-CAP-1.0.pdf>. 
You'll see mostly editorial changes from the earlier (August '03) 
version... the biggest change is the addition of a very limited 
provision for including binary "resource" files in CAP-based data 
broadcasts and that won't affect most CAP users.

Now... the next step is a vote by the full OASIS membership... and 
again I'm asking for your help.   OASIS (www.oasis-open.org) is a 
large international body comprising more than sixty separate 
technical committees and 600+ voting member organizations.  Most of 
those organizations have primary concerns other than emergency 
management... and we need affirmative votes from 15% of the 
membership for CAP to be recognized as a formal OASIS standard. 
That's something on the order of 100 "yes" votes.

Even if your organization hasn't been involved in the Emergency 
Management Technical Committee, it might still be a voting member of 
OASIS.  If so, would you please urge your organization's 
representative to cast her or his vote for adoption of CAP 1.0 during 
the March balloting?  Nobody claims CAP 1.0 is perfect... that's why 
we call it "1.0"... but it's a big, necessary step forward for public 
safety and homeland security.  Experience will teach us what we need 
to learn next.

Thanks again to everyone who's helped us bring CAP from a notion to 
an implementable reality in just two short years... including the 
Partnership for Public Warning, the ComCARE Alliance, the Emergency 
Interoperability Consortium, our friends at the Department of 
Homeland Security, the National Weather Service, the U.S. Geological 
Survey, the U.S. Army, the California Office of Emergency Services, 
the Virginia Department of Transportation and many other agencies in 
the US and abroad... and the hard-working members of the OASIS 
Emergency Management Technical Committee... and of course to all of 
YOU as members of the CAP Working Group!

- Art