Note that I've limited the distribution back to DM. The VOEvent
folks who are interested should be listening over here now.
On Jul 3, 2007, at 5:52 AM, Silvia Dalla wrote:
> 1. Is this representation aimed at Time/Flux time series only,
> or should it be catering for time series of other quantities too?
Other quantities, too, but I don't see any problem as long as we stick to scalars.
> (orbits of objects have been mentioned by others earlier).
That's a separate discussion. I'd say we're 90% of the way to a consensus of supporting orbital elements using STC. Individual observations of asteroids often accompany the orbital elements, however, and the former would still be a target for time series expressions.
> 2. The simplest time series table consists of 2 columns only: one
> giving the time and one giving the observable that is varying in time.
The simplest is one column, with a time grid expressed parametrically as a header attribute. A theoretical time series might even parameterize the dependent variable, too.
> Is the new representation aimed only at this very simple time series?
> Or can the representation describe more complicated time series tables
> that have a time column and several columns for different observables?
Most observational data will have one observable per time value, but may collect several observables into a single time series, which is to say that few time steps may correspond to two or more measurements.
> For those that were not at the HTN meeting it would be useful to know
> what are the objections against using a VOtable representation.
Mostly that we don't want to make our schema dependent on the varying quirks of all other VO schema. This issue may be neatly finessed by Doug's suggestion of referring to a separate object in the same bundle. Such is not currently supported.
> there are several VOtable parsers that work and applications that
> know how to deal with VOTables.
VOEvent is a publish/subscribe paradigm. The "publish" part of that is quite literal - we reach out of the VO into the larger community as a permanent record of assertions made by astronomers (through various instrumentalities). A particular project or institution may choose not to rely on standard parsers or applications. This doesn't mean that we want to avoid interesting VO technologies - but we do want to minimize their complexity for our purposes.
Rob Received on 2007-07-03Z19:49:35