VOEvent References

[Mike Fitzpatrick]

On Wed, Mar 16, 2011 at 10:42 AM, Rob Seaman <seaman at noao.edu> wrote:

> Matthew, Mike,
>
> What do you guys think?
>

Since I was asked....  I like Rick's idea of an 'ivoat' value as being a
concise way to
represent a concept like a Light Curve based on emerging IVOA work, however
this
still does nothing to help me write an application when the 'uri' attribute
can point to
any arbitrary file.  It only defines the semantic content of the
<Reference>, not the
pragmatic one I need in an app to know whether to URI is useful.

If there isn't an example of how <Reference> can be effectively used in the
parsing of
streams or mining of repositories then the self-congratulation of allowing
an arbitrary
file to be linked and saying you are part of the 'Semantic Web' is a bit
like having a
third nipple, useless.  Tell me how to write an app that knows
"ivoat:LightCurve" is
either a PNG file or an XML schema or a VOTable of values.  Convince me I
can
profitably use a 'type' attribute like

    "http://.../data-models/#h-filter-image"

and make it "machine-readable".

Sure, I can write an app that knows that GCN does this and then
LSST does that, but then you tell me there are many more sources
on the horizon. I don't want to build stream-specialized apps and
I don't want to have to create a new release to 'teach' my app about
the habits of each new stream to support it.

What I'm saying is: Either <Reference> is human-readable content
and can be arbitrary, or it's machine-readable in which case you
need to do more to say physically what the URI will return for an
application to be useful. If there is no actual usage of <Reference>
in the current (or future) VOEvent net, then contrain it, define it,
or lose it as being non-pragmatic.

-Mike
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