Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards www.oasis-open.org 23 September 2015 Thank you for being here today for the CAP workshop. OASIS is the Organization for the advancement of Structured Information Standards, a de jure, international standards body. In previous workshops an OASIS staff member has provided your welcome address. Today I am happy to welcome you as chair of the emergency management technical committee. OASIS has a small staff with the work done by members volunteering their time to develop specifications in the committee structure. The emergency management technical committee is one of over 60 technical committees in OASIS. Others include Cloud, Security, Smart Grid, Big Data, Cyber Threat Intelligence, etc. I am not OASIS staff but a volunteer with a technology background and a passion to get the alerts to people to save life and protect property. Instead of talking a lot about OASIS, I want to share with you why we chose OASIS as the standards body to bring up this work. I was on the board of trustees for the partnership for public warning that began to consider the work on first work that later became known as CAP. That board decided that we would survey available standards bodies to create a standard for alert and warning. Our requirements were that the resulting standard must be free as public safety entities are often least likely to pay; it must be international as disasters do not respect geographic or political boundaries and third it must be open to comments and input from any interested party while not being controlled by any one person, organization or country. OASIS met that need. The first CAP standard was ratified in 2004 and OASIS has been a sponsor for each of the CAP workshops since the first one in 2006. I will be giving a presentation in the last session to inform you of the additional work underway in our committee on CAP as well as other emergency management data standards. Welcome to the lovely city of Roma and the CAP workshop. Elysa Jones, Chair OASIS Emergency Management Technical Committee elysajones@yahoo.com