Major Change the section title to "Impact Spectrum" for 3.3
Replace the text with this rewritten content:
Alerts can be used to alert audiences to events of interest that have impacts that are minor, major, or anywhere in between. Often, the desire of many alerting authorities is to express that degree of impact quickly and succinctly as possible. In CAP, this is what the <headline> element is designed for; however, another way to do this is to encapsulate the degree of impact into the event type term. If an event type has an additional adjunct in the term that infers some sense of impact, such as “concern”, “problem”, “issue”, “hazard”, “emergency”, etc… then simply presenting the event type may be enough to get enough of the message across in presentation mediums where succinctness is key.
Image
Much like time-based terms, impact-based terms on their own are abstract. They convey the idea of an event and do not contravene the idea of a subject event in a CAP message. Impact-based terms come with the same advantages of time-based terms. For example, a “beach hazard” is an acceptable event type when “beach” on its own is vague for comparison purposes. Even the implied full event term “beach event” is vague - it really only answers the question of where, as opposed to what. Adding in the impact term “hazard”, as in “beach hazard” (or “beach hazard event” - as implied) makes the term much more helpful.