Herald

An open message standard for reporting the state of any tracked entity, position, battery, health, into a system, from any source that doesn't already have a standard of its own.

Herald does not compete with domain-specific standards that already exist and work well. MAVLink already solves this for flight vehicles, bidirectional, real-time, mature. Herald exists for everything MAVLink was never meant to cover: livestock tags, generic sensors, cellular trackers, anything that reports position and status but is never armed, flown, or given a flight command.

Schema

See herald.proto. One message, Herald, self-contained, no external dependencies. Compile it with protoc into whatever language you need.

Adopting Herald

Two ways, in order of preference:

1. Native. Emit Herald-shaped messages directly from your device or platform. No translation layer needed by anyone.
2. Mapped. Translate your existing payload into Herald with a declarative field mapping, consumed by a generic ingestion service. This is the practical path for existing systems that won't be rewritten, and it's configuration, not new code, per source.

Implementations

• Karshipta gateway (NIKX-Tech/karshipta): Native ingestion over HTTP (POST /herald, binary or JSON body), mapping a Herald message onto the gateway's own ward model alongside its MAVLink-connected wards. See gateway/docs/herald-ingest.md.

Adopting Herald somewhere else? Open a PR adding it to this list.

Status

v0. Schema defined and validated. Originated by NIKX Technologies as part of the Karshipta project, but maintained here independently, and intended for adoption by any system, not only Karshipta's own.

Relationship to other standards

Herald is one piece of a larger interoperability picture, not a replacement for standards that already have real ecosystems:

• CoT (Cursor on Target): the de facto standard in the tactical and emergency-response ecosystem (ATAK, WinTAK, TAK Server), originally specified by MITRE's Cursor-on-Target Message Router User's Guide. A Herald-CoT bridge is a planned interoperability target, not part of this schema.
• OGC SensorThings API: the established international standard for geospatial IoT data. A Herald-SensorThings bridge is a planned interoperability target, not part of this schema.

Contributing

See CONTRIBUTING.md for the compatibility rules a schema change has to follow, SECURITY.md to report a vulnerability, and CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md for community standards.

License

Apache License 2.0, deliberately more open than Karshipta's own AGPL-3.0, since a message standard should be as easy as possible for anyone to adopt without licensing friction.