VOEvent "Breaking News"?

[Rob Seaman]

Somehow or other I receive CNN breaking news items via email.  They keep the flux of messages low enough that it is rarely annoying.  The content of such a message is often a single declarative sentence, eg, "Senator Blowhard (AZ, Whig) has been convicted of accepting bribes in Federal District Court."

This is often the first I hear of certain types of stories.  Or the only time I hear of others - Serena Williams just won the Australian Open, for example.  The implication isn't that everybody cares passionately, but that many people will.

Is there a category of VOEvents that corresponds to this?  It could be implemented as a moderated "breaking news" VOEventStream.  This would complement a "Celestial Transient Alert of the Day", like the astronomy picture of the day, tending to occur at the other end of the event workflow after follow-up observations, classification and characterization.

Such messages likely share certain characteristics:  human readability, brevity, a reference linking to "the rest of the story" (cf Paul Harvey), maybe a picture - as well as that little extra VOEvent DNA to permit such alerts to connect to autonomous follow-up and VOEvent-enabled tools.

By contrast we have focused a lot of attention on the paradigm of user-specific filtering to separate KBO people from SNe people from GRB people.  Breaking News would be one way to address the factors bringing us together into a single community, while reaching out to the public (astronomy's ultimate customers) - and to "space domain" astronomers with a more static worldview.

Rob