Paper titled: Challenges of Optimizing Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) for SMS based GSM Devices in Last-Mile Hazard Warnings in Sri Lanka (authors N. Waidyanatha – LIRNEasia, D. Dias – University of Moratuwa, and H. Purasinghe – Microimage) was presented at the 19th Meeting of the Wireless World Research Forum (WWRF), in Chennai, India, 5-7 November, 2007. The paper was discussed in Working Group 1 – Human Perspective and Service Concepts (WG1).
LIRNEasia advocated Community-based Last-Mile Hazard Warning System pilot research (HazInfo project) field tested two GSM Terminal Devices: J2ME applet embedded Trilingual (Sinhala, Tamil, & English) mobile phone and GSM module/microcontroller based Remote Alarm Device (RAD). These two devices were developed as part of the Disaster and Emergency Warning Network (DEWN) under the umbrella of Dialog Telekom in collaboration with the University of Moratuwa located Dialog Mobile Communications Research Laboratory and the Microimage Mobile Communication Software Company. The paper discusses the potential and the shortcomings of CAP messaging with the use of SMS in a GSM environment as well as makes recommendations for future research and development.
The WWRF WG1 was made aware of the pragmatic issues of adopting CAP for Public Warning; whether it is with SMS or Cell Broadcasting the message must be unambiguous and in all local languages. Presented proposed that Mobile operators and handset manufacturers investigate the options of building onboard software for decoding CAP messages to reduce the message pay load, adopt globally accepted or intuitive symbolic/graphical schemes to communicate the alert messages independent of language, and embed natural language processors in handsets for users to select language of choice. The paper further proposes an optimal set of CAP elements to transport the message and a enumeration based strategy to encode and decode the CAP messages.
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