The EAS-CAP Industry Group – a broad coalition of equipment, software and service providers to the Emergency Alert System – today announced that its members have released a draft profile for the effective use and translation of the open, non-proprietary Common Alerting Protocol (CAP)1 for the next generation of broadcast EAS.
The profile will be an important step towards improving interoperability across agencies, jurisdictions, systems and vendors, helping to ensure that the public benefits from improved capabilities to communicate weather, civil, AMBER and other alerts via broadcast media.
The Industry Group will provide this profile as a recommendation to U.S. governmental agencies and industry associations on the use of CAP for EAS purposes, including the FCC, FEMA, National Weather Service, and other organizations. Group members intend to rapidly implement the EAS-CAP profile within their own systems and equipment. The EAS-CAP profile provides developers and manufacturers guidelines as to which elements in a CAP message are required for an EAS message, identifies how a mandatory alert from a state/territorial Governor would be identified, describes basic authentication and security features, recommends accepted formats for audio messages, and other features.
The output of the Group’s work is publicly accessible on its website www.eas-cap.org, and the Group will offer a mechanism for public comment on that site. The Group plans to continue its work to solicit feedback and provide recommendations to EAS stakeholders.
