VOEventRegExt

[Rob Seaman]

On May 30, 2014, at 10:14 AM, Matthew Graham <mjg at cacr.caltech.edu> wrote:

> Hi Markus,
> 
> Thanks for taking the trouble to give the document a thorough reading. At first pass most of these look reasonable - the document was produced a few years ago and RegWG practices have changed so it's good to bring this in line with current usage. Obviously your most contentious proposal is that VOEvent identifiers change from:
> 
> ivo://authori.ty/service/id#local.event.id
> 
> to
> 
> ivo://authori.ty/service/id?local.event.id
> 
> Clearly this needs further discussion within TDIG as it breaks current practice and code and requires an update to the VOEvent spec.

It sounds like some level of legacy support for hash will have to remain indefinitely.

It’s a good suggestion to "sharpen the use cases”.  I don’t think we can usefully decide these issues hypothetically.

We had a good example of the current state of the art this week with the false detection in M31.  Prior GRB researchers had manually subscribed to GCN many years past.  Resource discovery was by word of mouth at that time and delegated to grad students.  Large numbers of astronomers and the public became interested after the alert escaped into the wild via social media.  Some thought to locate more information - and more access to information - via ATel.  This was especially true after GSFC was knocked off the air by thunderstorms.  If ATel were registry-aware, users could click through to a ramifying web of interrelated resources - or robotic follow-up resources could explore that web autonomously.  The talking point about a GRB in M31 would have been quashed more efficiently, and perhaps the whole LIGO-worthy red herring would have been avoided by services noting the prior existence of a source at that location.  Etc.

Rob