EDXL, international, US-centricity [emergency-comment Public Comment]

All:

As mentioned yesterday in the teleconference - please take a little time to
review and comment on the international issues related to the following
spec:

"Public Review of Emergency Management EDXL-DE v1.0 Specification"
http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/tc-announce/200508/msg00006.html

Deadline for comments is 28 October 2005.

Regards,
Tony

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: 17 Sep 2005 15:23:48 -0000
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Subject: [emergency-comment] Public Comment

Comment from: 

Name: David Upton
Title: Director
Organization: Stirling Reid Limited (based in London, UK)

Regarding Specification: Emergency Data Exchange Language (EDXL)
Distribution Element, v. 1.0, Committee Draft, 19, August 2005

Is this intended purely as a US project or is it meant to be used
internationally? (I notice that most or all of your committee appear to be
US based.) Apart from anything else, US agencies must sometimes share
information with Canadians (in French?) or Mexicans (in Spanish?)

If it is meant to be international, had you considered including a tag for
the language used? (This would make machine translation much easier.)

Your geographical location codes (eg Element  	subdivision) use ISO 3166-2
designators. Would it be advisable to offer postcodes (zip codes) as an
alternative? These are precise ways of locating addresses, and many people
aremore likely to be able to specify them.

I also wonder if there are any ways in which US and non-US standards differ
- eg units of measurement. I haven't had time to study your standard in
detail, but are there elements where it might be worth specifying if units
are US or metric, for example?


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