Grandpa Ham – Grandpa Can do IT!

I will be explaining the contents of the new IPAWS-OPEN Developer’s Guide tomorrow. It will soon be added to downloads from the FEMA IPAWS-OPEN web site.
details are per the following:

Integrated Public Alert and Warning System (IPAWS) Developer Webinar
Open Platform for Emergency Networks (OPEN)
Introduction to the New IPAWS-OPEN Developer’s Guide
Wednesday January 18, 2012 12:00 Noon Eastern

IPAWS-OPEN enables the interoperable sharing of emergency alerts and incident-related data between systems that comply with non-proprietary information standards, and serves as the alert aggregator for the Integrated Public Alert and Warning System.

During our next Webinar, System Architect Gary Ham will provide an introduction and overview of the new IPAWS-OPEN Developer’s Guide. The purpose of the guide is to help developers successfully write IPAWS-OPEN interoperable code.

This program is intended primarily for third party IPAWS-OPEN developers and testers. Please make plans to join us via Live Meeting. As always, your questions and comments are welcome.

IMPORTANT: The audio portion of the program will be delivered via your computer speakers. The Live Meeting client must be used in order to receive the audio. Please review the instructions available from: http://www.fema.gov/pdf/emergency/ipaws/livemtginstruct.pdf prior to the program.

Login to MS Live Meeting for visuals: The following login link can only be used 30 minutes prior to the scheduled meeting time: https://www.livemeeting.com/cc/eiip/join?id=DMprogram&role=attend

If you are unable to attend this month’s program due to other commitments, a recording will be accessible from the FEMA Library.

• @dpmcgarry @niemexecdir saw your tweet Don. You might want to see my presentation from the last NIEM NTE. #

FEMA has announced its new course for Alerting Authorities. Alert Origination Software developers/vendors may also find the course useful to understand the context of alerting via IPAWS-OPEN to EAS, CMAS, and NOAA Radio. The course is required for alerting authorities as a pre-requisite for getting Alerting Authority for IPAWS push dissemination, but it also provides info for developers as they define requirements for the software they build. Here is the notification that I received:

The FEMA Integrated Public Alert and Warning System (IPAWS) program office has worked with FEMA’s Emergency Management Institute (EMI) and subject matter experts to create a course that provides alert and warning training. This course (IS-247) is now available at no cost on-line. See http://training.fema.gov/EMIWeb/IS/is247.asp

IS-247 provides basic information on the Integrated Public Alert and Warning System (IPAWS). The goal of this course is to provide public safety officials with: increased awareness of the benefits of using IPAWS for effective public warnings; skills to draft more appropriate, effective, and accessible warning messages; and best practices in the effective use of Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) to reach all members of their communities. The course is expected to take 2 hours to complete and includes a final exam.

Regional, State and Local alerting authorities must successfully complete this course prior to being authorized to use IPAWS OPEN to send alerts via EAS, mobile devices, and other communications pathways. Although the course is designed primarily for emergency management, law enforcement, fire services, dispatch, and other public safety personnel, anyone wishing to learn more about IPAWS may take the course.

• Personal note: grandpa of 6 will soon be grandpa of 8 – all boys. Wanted that princess – oh well. Love them all. #

• On my way to IAEM – testing from the airplane at 30000 ft. Tweeting EAS messages on @ipawsopenstate. Follow for all IAEM EAS examples. #
• Twitter does not do time zones. History just jumped ahead 5 hours. #

Funny thing about the national test held on Wednesday 9 November. It was a test of the old stuff; not the new. IPAWS-OPEN and the Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) were not even part of the test. It worked – with glitches – but it worked. The glitches seemed to be mostly about garbled messages and misinterpreted tones; things that the text and Internet-based IPAWS-OPEN solution are designed to prevent. I am confident that the next test, when it happens, will go MUCH better from that standpoint.

The comments about the national test that were most amusing were the ones that connected the National test with an attempt by the federal Government to “take over the airwaves and the Internet.” The internet was not even used. I am not going to comment on whether the Government wants to regulate (or over-regulate) the Internet. That may, or may not be, depending on your personal political perspective. What I can say his that FEMA’s IPAWS program is absolutely not involved in that sort of activity. Input can come from the president, but it can also come from local authorities at all levels of government using alert origination tools provided mostly by private industry. Dissemination is the same. It is primarily voluntary; using a Government provided query architecture that allows local agencies and information providers to weed out unwanted material, making it the very opposite of a Government forced content push. Finally, the “last mile distribution” is almost completely through commercial providers and/or a very wide variety local government controlled software from the commercial sector. So, while IPAWS is designed to provide a way for the president to get an emergency alert to as many people as possible at one time, its architecture is actually built with local alerting and local control at its very core. Check it out for yourself. I will be at the annual International Association of Emergency Managers (IAEM) convention in Las Vegas next week. Drop by the IPAWS booth to say “hi” and to get a live demonstration. Good stuff.

• Just added links to 9 FEMA fact sheets on #IPAWS Item 5 at http://t.co/xuwgzJF7 #
• 7 apps with the ability to originate properly signed CAP 1.2 msgs for distribution to #EAS and #CMAS thru #IPAWS A growing list! #

• 3 origination software vendors who can deliver signed CAP 1.2 alerts to IPAWS-OPEN. We are getting there…. #
• 5 different entities now able to post correctly signed CAP 1.2 alerts to IPAWS-OPEN in the pre-production Test Environment. It works! #

• Youngest some married off. Back to work today. #

IPAWS announced its CAP 1.2 Interface last Friday (30 September 2011).

The CAP 1.2 schema from OASIS imposes a pattern on date formats that forces the pattern to be exactly YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ss-hh:mm as specified in the CAP 1.2 schema. The last six could also be +hh:mm and represents the offset of the local time in the time string from GMT.

WSDL generated code from the IPAWS-OPEN WSDL may use a standard utility for converting a Java Calendar (or its equivalent in .Net) to a String for its XML writer that is in the form YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ss.nnn-hh:mm where the “.nnn” is in milliseconds. This will break the schema. In fact, it resulted in runtime errors in some code I generated from the CAP 1.2 WSDL for IPAWS-OPEN using Java axis2. My solution (credit to Prafash Kumar from Alerting Solutions who gave me his example) was to edit the stub code wherever there was a Calendar to string conversion to substring out the milliseconds from the conversion. There may be a better way, but my solution was successful. Here is a snippet I used in one of those conversion situations:

Original: xmlWriter.writeCharacters(org.apache.axis2.databinding.utils.ConverterUtil.convertToString(localEffective_type0));
Replacement: xmlWriter.writeCharacters(org.apache.axis2.databinding.utils.ConverterUtil.convertToString(localEffective_type0).replaceFirst(“.000”, “”));

I can get away with the “.000” string match because an incoming message to IPAWS-OPEN is also validated for a structure that contains no milliseconds, so the outgoing conversion will be a .000 if it is there at all.