The plug-in is called from mapping rules in circumstances where alarms need to be differentiated for correlation purposes by additional text based ASCII string values e.g. an SNMP trap variable contains say a "service name" that needs to be considered for accurate TeMIP alarm Clear Correlation purposes. The plug-in is passed the relevant ASCII string value extracted from alarm data by mapping rules. The plug-in calculates an integer value which is returned to the ruleset in order to be used to synthesize/supplement the relevant alarm attribute for correlation purposes.