Thank you Rob for starting this discussion.
>> Perhaps the place to start is therefore, why are we archiving VOEvent
>> messages in the first place? I'm not arguing we shouldn't, but I
>> think we need to be clear about the reasons.
I would like to add correlation of event streams as a driver for archiving events. It is like cross-match except in time. Perhaps the query interface should look like other cross-match tools. Some snip below about event correlation.....
New science will come from the archival correlation of multiple event streams. Because of the significance of correlation, we should encourage authors to publish even marginal events (e.g., “two-sigma” detections that would otherwise go unreported), since these may gain great value in correlation studies: often heralded in this respect is the detection of an otherwise marginal gravity wave event coincident in time with a gamma-ray burst. Another example: a flare at the center of a distant galaxy might be classified in an optical survey as normal active nucleus activity but instead, with concurrent X-ray and UV data from space, could be recognized as rare tidal disruption of a star, giving direct information about black hole growth (GALEX, in conjunction with a supernova survey, recently found such an event). A marginal detection of a neutrino event from Super-Kamiokande could be bolstered by a concurrent (yet unplanned) observation of a transient at another wavelength. Likewise, understanding the origin and nature of gravitational wave detections from LIGO-II and LISA will benefit from a federation of transient event data. Received on 2007-03-12Z17:29:47