Prototype of a Centralized Alert and Emergency System for Digital Terrestrial Television in Ecuador

Abstract

Latin America is living the migration towards the digital terrestrial television (DTT) with the ISDB-Tb standard. Some countries have even had the analog blackout. In relation to the Emergency Warning Broadcast System (EWBS), the process of transmission and reception is defined. In recent years, tests have been coordinated for the process of implementing EWBS for DTT. The Common Alert Protocol (CAP) allows emergency alerts to be exchanged between different communication systems. This article presents the implementation of a CAP module in a Spatial Data Infrastructure for risk management and integration of the EWBS for DTT in a single platform for emergency alerts. A web service that contains the codes representing the cantons of Ecuador was obtained, selected through the use of a map viewer and integrated with an application that processes this information and generates the alert to be transmitted via DTT. The main objective is the storage of the information in a database, and a WEB RSS service that contains the information in conformance with CAP format. A series of experiments show successful outcomes.