Introduction

CAAML (Canadian Avalanche Association Markup Language) is a standard for the electronic representation of information pertinent to avalanche safety operations. By building on existing Internet standards, CAAML expresses avalanche related information in a manner that can easily be shared over the World Wide Web. CAAML builds on the following two existing standards

• Extensible Mark-up Language (XML): A general purpose markup language promoted by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)
• Geographic Markup Language (GML): An XML grammar defined by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) to express geographic features

Purpose

The purpose of CAAML is to provide the definitions for the data file structure to support electronic exchange of avalanche related information. CAAML defines the structure and elements of observations types, specifies how locations are referenced, provides a mechanism for linking observations with each other and contains a method for associating external data files.

Active Version

The most current version of CAAML is Version 4.2. For a complete list of published versions see Published Versions. A minor upgrade to Version 4.3 is scheduled for the fall of 2009. For more details see Suggested Changes.

Current Usage

CAAML has been used extensively by the Canadian Avalanche Association since it introduction in 2003. At the present time, CAAML Version 3.0.3 is used operationally in the InfoEx service and the Canadian Avalanche Information System (CAIS). It is intended that current services will be updated during the summer of 2009 to fully run on CAAML 4.2. CAAML 4.2 is fully compliant with the latest version of the CAA’s Observation Guidelines and Recording Standards (OGRS 2007).

Documentation

We are currently in the process of developing a online documentation about CAAML in the form of a wiki