Major Section 2.4 has been rewritten and here is the suggested new text:
When an alerting authority identifies a hazardous or concerning event as a “subject” event, it is helpful if the alerting authority and audience both have some prior understanding of the expected impacts of the event. That prior understanding comes from associating the subject event to a known event type. Defined event types assist in communicating to an audience the impacts of any single subject event.
The OASIS CAP standard defines the <event> element as… “the text denoting the type of the subject event of the alert message”. This means that the authority is not actually citing the subject event in the <event> element, only its type. For example, a subject event like “hurricane Katrina” would have an event type classification of “hurricane” as hurricane is the term given to events with conditions characteristic of a hurricane.
The full term in the context of this example is “hurricane event type”, where “type” is the object of the sentence, “event” is a permanent adjunct modifier to “type”, and “hurricane” is the actual event type being classified. Since the CAP standard established this element as “event type”, there is no need to repeat the words “event” or “type” in the list of types. NOTE: In the example, “hurricane” is also an adjunct describing the “event type”.
Using another example, the term “forest fire” is also an acceptable event type for alerting. Here, there are two noun adjuncts used to describe a more narrowly defined “event type” as opposed to using just “fire”. Another example of an event type is “ice”, and the more narrowly defined “thin ice”. The word “thin” however is a qualitative modifier and not an adjunct, and demonstrates the value that qualitative modifiers can occasionally bring to the task.
Multi-word types operate equally well or even better than single-word types. For example, a single-word event type of “emergency” is not acceptable for comparison purposes. Consumers wanting to compare this with other event types would welcome additional modifiers. The EMTC has to evaluate each case and use or limit modifiers as needed. NOTE: multi-word event types generally have an accepted best order in English (i.e. “forest fire” and “thin ice”, as opposed to “fire forest” and “ice thin”).