VOEvent priorities

[Andrew Drake]

Hi Rob,

On Wed, 3 Feb 2010, Rob Seaman wrote:
> On Feb 3, 2010, at 5:43 PM, Andrew Drake wrote:
>>> astronomers often include time series in their "telegrams" and VOEvent seeks the capability of representing diverse sorts of such messages.
>>
>> Yes, CBAT certainly encourages a reference magnitude or two. However, I highly doubt they would publish the hundreds of points I could send them.
> We seek to be capable of representing CBAT content as one (possible) publisher out of many.  (Other considerations control whether or under what circumstances this might ever happen.)
> Whether CBAT might want to represent other (VOEvent) publishers' content is their business.
>> Likewise, time series data is not very common in ATels since the number of characters one can include is limited.
> And we seek to go beyond the limitations of current technologies.  Limits on the length of an ATel need not apply to VOEvent.
>> In most cases people tend to refer to external data if people want to include time series or additional data.
> This option is already possible for VOEvent.  It seems orthogonal to whether and how one might represent a time series within the packet.

Your comment above seemed clear, "astronomers often include time series in their "telegrams"".
Based on Roy's limited results I would think that this is not often the case. Rather, even
though it is possible to include time series in ATels, it is uncommon. We certainly want to go
beyond other types of telegrams, but I'm not sure that including time series should be a higher
priority than establishing a general way to include, or at least referencing the other kinds of
tabulated data. It seems that a real world example comes from the other types of tables
that people are already including in their ATels and other publications.
As with Matthew, I would much rather that a loose bag of TOT was not included within VOEvents.

>>> However, as chair I'm a little unsure how to respond to a request to revisit a group decision made more than two years ago at HTU-1.  Has something changed to cause us to view the question differently?
>>
>> I don't remember this either. Perhaps somebody else will.
>
> http://bit.ly/bPhfzE

Yep, I remember some people signing that paper. Although not one of them, it is clearly
one way to include time series in VOEvents, even if nothing to do with a need.

cheers,
       Andrew
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