Severity
The independent SEV-0-SEV-5/UNKNOWN scale for real-world event impact.
Draft v0.1 — design contract, not yet a live service
This documentation set defines a proposed Time Seventeen protocol for review and implementation planning. https://api.t17.capital is the approved and reserved REST origin, but neither that origin nor any documented endpoint is claimed to be live. The WebSocket origin remains unspecified. Credentials, chain IDs, contract addresses, rate limits, and SLAs remain unapproved; IDs, prices, and timestamps shown throughout are illustrative, not real production data.
Severity Assessment measures the observed or forecast real-world impact of an Event — human, economic, infrastructure, geographic, geopolitical, and duration dimensions. It is a completely separate resource from Market Rating: it says nothing about whether any market tracking the event is a good, tradable, or well-resolved market.
Independent from Market Rating
Severity Assessment measures real-world impact of an event, not market quality or tradability. It never derives from, embeds, or is derived from a Market Rating. No severity payload contains rating fields, and no rating payload contains severity fields.
Scale
| Level | Meaning |
|---|---|
SEV-0 | No verified material impact |
SEV-1 | Limited/localized impact |
SEV-2 | Material but contained impact |
SEV-3 | Severe multi-system or regional impact |
SEV-4 | Extreme national/cross-border impact |
SEV-5 | Catastrophic/systemic impact |
UNKNOWN | Insufficient or conflicting evidence |
Component scores
Every Severity Assessment carries six required component dimensions, each independently scored under the severity methodology version:
human— casualties, displacement, injury, and welfare impact.economic— direct and indirect economic loss or disruption.infrastructure— damage to or disruption of physical/digital infrastructure.geographic— spatial extent of impact.geopolitical— diplomatic, political, or cross-border stability impact.duration— expected or observed duration of impact.
Forecast vs. observed
Severity Assessments carry an explicit assessment_type distinguishing forecast (a modeled or analyst projection of impact) from observed (a record of impact that has already materialized). These are distinct values and MUST NOT share a single timeline entry without a label — a reader must always be able to tell whether a given severity value describes a prediction or a confirmed observation.
Assessment record fields
Beyond the component scores, each Severity Assessment carries: overall score, level, a confidence interval/range where meaningful, evidence references, a concise human-readable rationale, the event’s time window, an observation cut-off timestamp, publication and effective timestamps, methodology version, provenance (analyst/model), and supersession/dispute/override/withdrawal/correction metadata.
Event-level vs. Severity Index
A Severity Assessment may attach directly to an Event, or be aggregated into an independently calculated Severity Index (analogous in use case to a war/conflict index or a catastrophe-severity index) that tracks a family of related events over time. Both surfaces use the same SEV-0–SEV-5/UNKNOWN scale and the same append-only history model.
Append-only history, never overwritten
A Severity Assessment is never overwritten in place. A later assessment supersedes an earlier one via supersedes_id, and the original remains permanently readable. Reviews, disputes, overrides, withdrawals, and corrections are recorded as distinct events on this timeline.
Where to go next
- Market Ratings for the separate market-quality scale.
- API Reference → Severity for the concrete current/history/methodology endpoint contract and schema, including the Severity Index endpoints.