The Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) is an XML-based data format for exchanging public warnings and emergencies between alerting technologies. CAP allows a warning message to be consistently disseminated simultaneously over many warning systems to many applications, such as Google Public Alerts and Cell Broadcast. CAP increases warning effectiveness and simplifies the task of activating a warning for responsible officials. Standardized alerts can be received from many sources and configure their applications to process and respond to the alerts as desired. Alerts from the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of the Interior's United States Geological Survey, and the United States Department of Commerce's National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and state and local government agencies can all be received in the same format by the same application. That application can, for example, sound different alarms, based on the information received. By normalizing alert data across threats, jurisdictions, and warning systems, CAP also can be used to detect trends and patterns in warning activity, such as trends that might indicate an undetected hazard or hostile act. From a procedural perspective, CAP reinforces a research-based template for effective warning message content and structure. The CAP data structure is backward-compatible with existing alert formats including the Specific Area Message Encoding (SAME) used in NOAA Weather Radio and the broadcast Emergency Alert System as well as new technology such as the Wireless Emergency Alerts (WEA), while adding capabilities such as the following: Flexible geographic targeting by using latitude/longitude “boxes” and other geospatial representations in three dimensions Multilingual and multi-audience messaging Phased and delayed effective times and expirations Enhanced message update and cancellation features Template support for framing complete and effective warning messages Digital encryption and signature capability Facility for digital images, audio, and video. Background The US National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) November 2000 report on "Effective Disaster Warnings" recommended that "standard method should be developed to collect and relay instantaneously and automatically all types of hazard warnings and reports locally, regionally and nationally for input into a wide variety of dissemination systems." In 2001, an international independent group of over 120 emergency managers that was convened online by California emergency telecommunications expert Art Botterell began specifying and prototyping the Common Alerting Protocol data structure based on the recommendations of the NSTC report. The project was embraced by the non-profit Partnership for Public Warning and a number of international warning system vendors. A