[EDIS] update to EDIS alert forwarding
Ian Kluft
ikluft at thunder.sbay.org
Mon Mar 2 23:52:07 PST 2009
I made a major update to the script that forwards California OES EDIS alerts
to this list. Now it makes an effort to filter out alerts marked "statewide"
which are localized to distant areas of the state.
http://www.svwux.org/twiki/bin/view/SVWUX/CalOesEdisAlerts
I included the source code for the script, for anyone who's curious. It
actually took a bit of work to add some smarts to the script. It tries to
recognize phone area codes and city or county names in the alerts. If one
or more locations are recognized and none are from Santa Clara County or
immediately adjacent counties or area codes, now those get discarded
automatically.
I don't claim it's perfect. And it will probably need some tuning. It's
reasonable to expect that when complexity is added to any system.
Now the e-mails also include an attachment with the Common Alerting Protocol
(CAP) XML from OES so you have all the posted details. There's a stylesheet
pointer in it so it should render in a graphical mail reader or browser. We
may need to tweak it to get it working comfortably for everyone.
So it was a big improvement. But why go to all this effort?
Those who are on the list or looked at the archive saw a low signal-to-noise
ratio due to Amber Alerts from Riverside County (in Southern California) and
Siskiyou County (in Upstate California). Not that we aren't sympathetic -
but people won't use the system if it just overwhelms their e-mail traffic
volume for stuff so far away in the huge area of California. It looks like
the officials in Yreka (Siskiyou County) seemed to just keep clicking "send"
until they saw copies start coming back from Sacramento. Then they might
have realized they shouldn't have kept clicking. I was already working on
this upgrade over the weekend. The repetition of that alert was the last
straw.
I didn't want people to get fatigued from using the SVWUX EDIS forwarding
just after it started. So I thought this change was needed.
In the future I think some of this code will be broken out and evolve into
a new XML::CAP Perl module. SVWUX will have uses for that.
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