Alert Hubs will play a significant role in receiving and sharing early warnings. It was anticipated that each Nation would require to host a National Alert Hub. Those Alert Hubs would feed into the Global Filtered Alert Hubs.
Eliot Christian in his presentation said, “With so many countries implementing CAP-enabled alerting, we can see that soon there will be thousands of CAP alert sources worldwide, together delivering hundreds of alerts per second. And so, the time is ripe for the next step: technology to select from this rich trove of emergency alerting just those alerts needed for particular cases.”
The Sahana Alerting and Messaging Broker (SAMBRO) has certainly been gearing up to provide a complementing service. In one aspect, SAMBRO is capable of subscribing to CAP messages, aggregating them, and then allowing authorized personnel to relay those messages, whether they be public, private, or restricted. The process of originating and relaying was already tested in the Philippines. CAP messages that come into SAMBRO can be offered through a RSS feed or a RESTfull API. Users may subscribe to receive alerts from SAMBRO though email, SMS, FTP, and Mobile APP as well.
We heard at the 2016 CAP Implementation Workshop that as part of their Big Data Project, NOAA is collaborating with Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, IBM, Microsoft and the Open Commons Consortium in developing the Filtered Alert Hub technology. Serving as a National Alert Hub, SAMBRO would provide a valid CAP feeds to the Filtered Alert Hub as well as receive feeds from the Filtered Alert Hub to relay through Email, SMS, FTP, and the Mobile APP.
The CAP Implementation Workshop is the only expert forum that brings together warning experts, working with the Common Alerting Protocol (CAP), around the world to discuss the pros and cons of using CAP as an interoperability standard. The 2016 forum took place in Thailand. It is my great pleasure to bring this expert forum to Asia for the second time (first time was in Sri Lanka).