Technical plans for an Indian Ocean tsunami warning system are being discussed at a conference in Perth, capital of Australia's state of Western Australia.

Around 100 representatives of 27 Indian Ocean countries are participating in the three-day meeting starting Wednesday to work on plans including coordinating data and communicating warnings.

The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has taken on the task of getting the warning system up and hopes to have it running by the middle of next year.

Patricio Bernal, executive secretary of UNESCO's Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission (IOC), said putting a monitoring system in place would be the easy part of the project while making it effective is more of a challenge.

"Well, the system is a really complex one, not so much in terms of the instrumentation and the network, but the operation of a warning system requires at least three major components that are different," Bernal told Australian Broadcasting Corporation radio.

"One is the detection ... one is the assessment of the risk -- and this has to be done by each of the nations of the region -- and the third element is, of course, emergency preparedness," he said.

"There is no use to have a very fine warning system if you don' t have plans to prepare and evacuate the populations and to communicate to them, alert the authorities and coordinate logistics to move people," he said.

He said he is confident the system will be up and running in a short period of time because several major meetings have yielded positive responses from nations surrounding the Indian Ocean, and an interim tsunami warning information delivering system was established in March.

Source: Xinhua