Common Alerting Protocol

SmartApps & Automations Automation Ideas
1

A significant number of emergency response and public warning systems are using the Common Alerting Protocol (CAP - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Alerting_Protocol), and from what I can tell are publishing those CAP files with RSS.

I’ve been experimenting with triggers in IFTTT, or in Zapier for more control (then sending those to IFTTT to trigger SmartThings), but that adds a lot of delay-time, and in the case of something like a tornado, every second counts.

Basically, if there were a warning matching a specific criteria and area (with SmartThings or something else checking the feed frequently), it would be great if this could trigger push notifications, texts, etc. like you can do now for a flood. Maybe even sound a siren. All of the actions are possible with SmartThings, but it’s just about parsing the data and creating the triggers.

Is anyone aware of any solution(s) for this? I wasn’t able to find one native to SmartThings, but maybe there’s something that would integrate nicely.

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+1

Someone at ST get on this!

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+1. Everyone’s got their reasons for wanting a smart home. One of my big ones is safety, and this would be a big step forward.

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You might even be able to use some of Google’s services for this. At times, I have gotten alerts from google even before the weather radio went off.

Take a look at

http://www.google.org/crisisresponse/resources.html

and

http://alert-hub.appspot.com/publishers

The second link has rss feeds for NWS,USGS, West Coast Tsunami warning center and others

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Great idea, I would love to see something done with this. I’ve integrated with CAP for my software solutions. If I ever find the time, I might try and integrate with it in ST.

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Should integration like this be a device or an App?

I wonder if we should work towards building a template Device to handle different RSS, CAP, JSON, etc feeds - then we can more rapidly incorporate different sources in the future.

I would love to see something like this integrated, the problem is - in our backwater of a country (Australia) the government keeps talking about posting data in a standard way - but then years on, still doesn’t do anything with it.

1 Like