The U.S.US [[National Science and Technology Council]] (NSTC) November 2000 report on “Effective"Effective Disaster Warnings”Warnings" recommended that “a "standard method should be developed to collect and relay instantaneously and automatically all types of hazard warnings and reports locally, regionally and nationally for input into a wide variety of dissemination systems”systems."<ref>{{cite web |url=http://www.sdr.gov/NDIS_rev_Oct27.pdf |title=Archived copy |accessdate=2006-05-03 |deadurl=yes |archiveurl=https://web.archive.org/web/20060513144112/http://www.sdr.gov/NDIS_rev_Oct27.pdf |archivedate=2006-05-13 |df= }}</ref>
In 2001, an international, independent group of over 120 emergency managers that was convened online by California emergency telecommunications expert Art Botterell began specifying and prototyping the Common Alerting Protocol data structure based on the recommendations of the NSTC report. The project was embraced by the non-profit Partnership for Public Warning and a number of international warning system vendors.<ref>http://www.ppw.us {{webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20020928072102/http://www.ppw.us/ |date=2002-09-28 }}</ref> A series of field trials and long-term demonstration projects during 2002-03 led to the submission of a draft CAP specification to the OASIS standards process for formalization.
The CAP 1.0 specification was approved by [[OASIS (organization)|OASIS]] in April 2004. Based on experience with CAP 1.0, the OASIS Emergency Management Technical Committee adopted an updated CAP 1.1 specification in October 2005.<ref>http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/emergency</ref><ref>http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/download.php/14759/emergency-CAPv1.1.pdf</ref> At a meeting in Geneva in October 2006 the CAP 1.1 specification was taken under consideration by the [[International Telecommunications Union]] for adoption as an ITU recommendation. CAP was subsequently adopted as Recommendation x.1303.
The latest CAP specification version 1.2 ishas been available since July 2010 at the OASIS Web sitewebsite.<ref>http://docs.oasis-open.org/emergency/cap/v1.2/CAP-v1.2-os.pdf</ref>
