features for VOEvent v2.0

[Matthew Graham]

Hi,

On Apr 7, 2010, at 2:56 PM, Roy Williams wrote:

> Lynne Jones wrote:
>> I would like to see orbital elements and ephemerides allow for uncertainties in the elements and in the ephemeris predictions. I don't know if that has already been thought of, but I know the most common source of ephemerides at the moment (the MPC) often doesn't include an ephemeris error, so thought it might be worth mentioning.   
> 
> The LSST events can include whatever they like as Params. If you would like a parameter called "Eccentricity_Inclination_Covariance", there is no problem at all.
> 
> The question that we are chewing in the VOEvent Working Group is whether there should be special schema for orbital elements, meaning an XML element called <Eccentricity>.
> 
> In the former case, the author can be precise and idiosyncratic, but a human needs to read the description to find out what it really means. In the latter case, everyone is forced into the same data model that is defined by the IVOA, but the advantage is that different event providers can interoperate without a need for translation.

Except that there are mechanisms which allow interoperability with the first option as well. If you call your parameter: http://www.cacr.caltech.edu/~roy/myScheme#Eccentricity_Inclination_Covariance and have a human-readable description at that URL that we can interoperate. I can set up a thesaurus that says that "http://www.cacr.caltech.edu/~roy/myScheme#Eccentricity_Inclination_Covariance" is the same as "http://some.other.edu/~any/scheme#eci" and there is no need for a centralised data model.

	Cheers,

	Matthew
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