some remarks on VOEvent

[Roy Williams]

> On Fri, 3 Jun 2005, Rob Seaman wrote:
>> That's actually a good example that may illuminate these issues.  It
>> would be straightforward to describe a specific ocean tide
>> measurement in a VOEvent packet.  These are certainly observations of
>> astronomical events, after all.  Conjectures on tidal expressions in
>> astronomical ontologies?  Will these support generalized central
>> force representations?  And will they be expressed as spatial
>> derivatives of Kepler's or Newton's laws?  Or, rather, directly as an
>> inverse cube?
>
On Jun 4, 2005, at 12:29 AM, Ashish Mahabal wrote:
> Or a comet breaking up. Once it is seen to break up, does each part 
> form a
> separate VOEvent? Or is it a single VOEvent extending over larger and
> larger distance. What when some of the pieces have banged into a planet
> and others have not?

The key is to let the event publisher make the difficult decisions. If 
the publisher submits new VOEvent packets for each piece of comet with 
no citation, then they are separate. If the publisher chooses to cites 
a unique previous VOEvent that refers to the whole comet, then they are 
linked by citation chain, and we consider the whole "intra-cited" group 
to be one astrophysical event.
>
> This question has been asked before:
> Should we try to describe everything for everyone?

NO NO and NO. But we should give people "on the scene" the opportunity 
and space to use their scientific judgement to make descriptions as 
they see fit.