Towards a wide area alerting and notification system

Abstract

This paper describes the concept of a Wide Area Alerting System (WAAS), a flexible ICT platform for building alerting and notification applications. It is tailored to the generation and dissemination of complex alerts or notifications derived from geospatial-temporal data originating from heterogeneous sensors, models and/or monitoring processes. A WAAS implementation explicitly recognises and harnesses spatial location and time and is interesting for its ability to receive and combine observed events of multiple phenomena, over wide geographic areas, into highly targeted, rich notifications/alerts, delivered to potentially large numbers of users over convenient communication channels. It can be deployed in a variety of scenarios that require functionality for notifying users about phenomena or events occurring at geographical scales. Furthermore, events that could trigger alerts or notifications may be fast-moving or slow to unfold – even over a period of hours or days. This paper describes the functional and non-functional design goals, system architecture and software infrastructure, usage scenarios and implementation experiences to date of the WAAS.