VOEvent - Param comment

[Rob Seaman]

Hi Tony,

> The reason that VOEvent and VOTable has stuff like <param> tags and  
> the like (and VOTable has a lot worse) is because they are dead-end  
> technologies.

Let's give it a few years and see :-)

All design is evolutionary, therefore all technologies are dead-end.   
No natural selection without obsolescence.

> They cannot be used for anything except being looked at by humans

Even this would be an improvement on the state of astronomical alerts  
before April 2005.  If, however, VOEvent packets do prove unusable  
for autonomous purposes, I am confident that the rather aggressive  
interest in driving these initiatives forward will cause the standard  
to evolve in response.

> (which is the most daft fudge I've seen in over 30 years of  
> development)

Sounds more like a kludge than a fudge.  Cold fusion was a fudge.

> the schema approach is the more pragmatic

That may be the first time this statement has been made :-)

I think we would all love to see the schema approach succeed - just  
like we'd all love to see ontologies prosper like the fruits of  
Soviet five year plans.  Assertions about pragmatism are themselves  
rather devoid of semantic content.  Either these things will succeed  
or they won't.  Whatever happens, it's hard to believe that one size  
will fit all situations.

> I will say that at least VOEvent does have its core data in  
> properly tagged elements

Given this comment, it sounds like we got the balance just about right!

The point was to render unto Caesar (if only Caligula, not Julius),  
what needed to be rendered.  We deemed the citation mechanism as key  
to follow-up, for instance, and focused on limiting the semantics.   
We perceived space-time coordinates, the independent variables of an  
observation, as requiring special handling and pressed forward with  
STC.  This was not done lightly :-)  And we also decided that the  
general question of how to handle the completely open ended situation  
with dependent variables was best handled using the <param>  
mechanism, rather than by requiring a complete a priori data modeling  
exercise for every event type.

Will our duckling be revealed a swan - or merely fowl and homely?

Rob
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