Overview#
A hurricane warning requires reaching every resident within a coastal flood zone through every available channel at once: SMS, voice call, push notification, and email. For situations meeting federal thresholds, the same message must go through the FEMA IPAWS system with a dual-approval workflow before broadcast. The Notification domain handles that full scope, from geofenced campaign targeting to IPAWS compliance and delivery tracking.
Key Features#
- Mass notification engine with multi-channel delivery: SMS, voice, email, and push
- FEMA IPAWS integration for federal emergency alert system compliance
- Geofencing service for location-based notification targeting
- Campaign management with delivery tracking and budget controls
- Wireless Emergency Alert support with character limit compliance
- SAME code accuracy for geographic targeting
- Multi-language and accessibility support including TDD/TTY
- Dual approval workflow for production IPAWS alerts
Use Cases#
Relevant sectors include public safety communications, critical infrastructure, and national emergency management.
- Sending mass emergency notifications to populations within geographic zones
- Issuing federal emergency alerts through the IPAWS system
- Targeting notifications based on geofence boundaries and population estimates
- Running multi-channel notification campaigns with delivery rate monitoring
Integration#
The Notification domain integrates with Command for incident coordination, Alert for internal alerting, Predictive for surge prediction, and external systems including FEMA IPAWS, SMS gateways, voice gateways, email services, and push notification services.
Open Standards#
- OASIS Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) 1.2: All FEMA IPAWS alerts are serialised as CAP 1.2 XML (namespace
urn:oasis:names:tc:emergency:cap:1.2), including the mandatory urgency, severity, certainty, event code, area, and geocode elements. - W3C XML Signature Syntax and Processing (XML-DSig): CAP alert documents are signed with an enveloped RSA-SHA256 signature using the Exclusive XML Canonicalisation (exc-c14n) algorithm before submission to the IPAWS gateway.
- SAME (Specific Area Message Encoding): Geographic targeting for EAS and NWR alert channels uses SAME event codes, which are stored and embedded in the CAP
eventCodeelement withvalueNameofSAME. - GeoJSON (RFC 7946): Geofence boundaries and CAP polygon areas are stored and exchanged as GeoJSON geometry objects, enabling interoperability with mapping and spatial-analysis tooling.
- PKCS#12 (RFC 7292): FEMA-issued COG signing credentials are stored and loaded as PKCS#12 (.p12/.pfx) containers, from which the private key and certificate are extracted for XML-DSig operations.
- OAuth 2.0 JWT Bearer Grant (RFC 7523): Push notification delivery via Firebase Cloud Messaging uses a service-account JWT signed with RS256, exchanged at Google's token endpoint under the
urn:ietf:params:oauth:grant-type:jwt-bearergrant type. - SMTP with STARTTLS (RFC 5321 / RFC 3207): Email notification delivery supports a direct SMTP provider path with STARTTLS upgrade for transport-layer encryption alongside cloud email API providers.
- GeoJSON Polygon Containment (Ray-Casting Algorithm): Geofence membership checks implement the standard ray-casting point-in-polygon algorithm against GeoJSON-derived coordinate arrays, complemented by the Haversine formula (Earth spherical geometry) for radius-based zones.
Last Reviewed: 2026-02-05 Last Updated: 2026-04-14