VOEvent References

[Roy Williams]

On 03/16/2011 2:04 PM, Matthew Graham wrote:
> Get the humans out of the loop as much as possible - they can go "ah"
> and "ooh" at pretty pictures. The future of astronomy is machine
> astronomy.

Matthew

Yes of course. The events are created and processed by machines. But the 
*streams* are built and connected up by humans who know what they are 
doing, like I have been doing with many event authors in the last 2 years.

Building the stream is like setting the thermometer in the house (a 
human activity), followed by the heating system going on and off 1000s 
of times (automated activity), analogous to the event delivery and 
processing.

The human understands that there is a light curve, and arranges for 
automated analysis of it, with the *knowledge* that the analysis is 
scientifically suitable for the data.

Are you suggesting that more formalism in the VOEvent structure could 
somehow replace this human understanding?

Roy