Overview

CAAML is a high comprehensive and flexible standard that aims to accommodate the needs of a wide range of different avalanche safety applications. Dealing with entire CAAML standard can therefore be overwhelming and frustrating.

To facilitate the adoption of CAAML, various so-called 'CAAML V5.0 Profiles' have been developed for specific areas of interest. CAAML V5.0 Profiles are logical restrictions of CAAML that are defined in by an XML schema. The concept of profiles was borrowed from GML and first introduced to CAAML at V5.0.

CAAML Profiles simplify the work of developers since they remove unnecessary flexibility of CAAML and the data model is restricted to elements most relevant to the specific area of interest. At the same time, since all of the profiles are derived from the same CAAML standard, they share a common overall structure and have many similarities. Developers and programmers familiar with one profile should have not problems moving another profile.

Note that profiles are distinctly different from application schemas. While CAAML profiles are part of the CAAML namespace and every XML file that validates against a CAAML Profile also validates against the overall CAAML standard, related application schema are XML vocabularies that use CAAML but reside in a application-specific namespace and are therefore not compatible.

Aspects that are typically defined in a CAAML Profile are:

• How location information encoded
• What observation elements are supported
• Enumerations and units
• Links between elements

Available Profiles