Telephone Interface for Avalanche Warnings Based on Information Server for Adaptable Content Delivery

We present a system that provides an advanced telephone service for the dissemination of both national and regional avalanche forecasts in the Swiss Alps. The service enables members of the public and also mountain guides to access forecast information while travelling in mountain areas and, particularly, to be notified when entering regions of high risk. By telephone access, we include both voice and WAP-based access as well as combinations of both. The service is achieved through the integration of a special forecast content delivery database, including geographical data for location-dependent delivery, into the overall avalanche information system architecture. This database was implemented using the XIMA framework for adaptable content delivery, which is based on an XML server for the OMS Java data management system and XSLT presentation templates. The speech interface was implemented