Re: [emergency] [OASIS Issue Tracker] (EMERGENCY-34) Support the concept of an event in CAP

[Art Botterell <acb@incident.com>]

Like the concept of "incident," the concept of "event" turns out on careful inspection to be more complex and subtle than it may seem at first glance.  E.g., a convective supercell may spawn a number of distinct tornados: which is "the event"?  Likewise, an earthquake "event" may be the cause of dozens or even hundreds of individual fires, structure collapses, gas leaks and medical emergencies.  To which individual or collection of events does any individual alert pertain?

As has been suggested a specialized message format for describing individual events might be useful, if it doesn't exist.  And building on that a way to associate one or more event descriptions with an alert might also be useful.  But there's not necessarily a one-to-one correspondence between event and alert.  That's one reason the <description> field is free-form... to allow flexibility in describing the event or events that are driving the alert without bogging down the originator.  It strikes me as possibly mission creep to try to solve the event-characterization challenge within the alerting mechanism.