VOEvent "Breaking News"?

[Kirk D Borne]

There has been discussions within the LSST public outreach office
about a CN^2 (C N squared = Cosmic News Network), whose goal is to 
aggregate and synthesize information on "What�s New in the Universe".
CN^2 would include daily "Traffic" and "Weather" alerts.  These 
would be a daily (or weekly) updated announcement of a new alert 
(or new data) on an interesting moving object (asteroid, TNO, KBO, 
MBA, NEO, ... => hence, "Cosmic Traffic Report!"), and a similar 
annoucement of a photometric transient (=> hence, "Cosmic Weather Report").  
Okay, these labels are a bit cheesey, but the idea is to provide 
something similar to the CNN breaking news messages that Rob 
described, within the context of time-domain astronomy of course,
which would aim to disseminate information about some of the
most interesting alerts.  

A prototype LSST CN^2 web portal is now being designed, with the
goal of deploying it during the next year.  The alerts may be
fed from the VOEventNet, or Catalina Sky Survey, or some other
specific sky-monitoring survey.  This is being deployed now
in order to develop and test the CN^2 concept as the eventual 
public information news portal for LSST.

- Kirk

----- Original Message -----
From: Joshua Bloom <profjsb at gmail.com>
Date: Saturday, January 30, 2010 1:04 pm
Subject: Re: VOEvent "Breaking News"?

> I suppose the biggest hurdle is not the technology but the 
> authority factor. CNN is the most trusted name in news. Or so it 
> goes. So if they spam you, you might not like what they say but 
> there's implicit trust in what they say matters to some. 
> Accumulating authority on interesting Events will take 
> considerable time. There is the chance that trusted names/groups 
> might have a pretty lousy stream of transients. Likewise, more 
> obscure group could have a bunch of golden events but not be 
> hooked up the VOEventNet. 
> 
> My bet is that by having a "third party" aggregator that isn't in 
> the transients discovery business, and thus would have not much of 
> a bias in promulgating certain events, is the way forward. NOAO 
> (the most trust trusted name in optical photons) seems like a good 
> place of issuance.
> 
> Josh
> 
> ****************************************
> Joshua Bloom
> Associate Professor
> UC Berkeley, Astronomy
> 510-643-4621 (Lab)
> 510-643-3839 (Office)
> *****************************************
> 
> 
> 
> On Jan 30, 2010, at 9:00 AM, Rob Seaman wrote:
> 
> > 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
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