[evla-sw-discuss] Terminology

[Barry Clark]

The solution that we found worked best at the VLBA was to have the "alert"
equivalents look up in a text file how severe the condition is considered
(which essentially only determines what color it is displayed on the screen).
That way, a knowlegeable operator can tailor the appearance of the screen
without having to invade the parts of the software that actually affect
what is tested or recorded.  Alternative would be to make this an attribute
of the structure generated by the XML initializer.

> From evla-sw-discuss-admin at donar.cv.nrao.edu Mon Oct 27 14:05 MST 2003
> From: Boyd Waters <bwaters at nrao.edu>
> Organization: National Radio Astronomy Observatory
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> Subject: Re: [evla-sw-discuss] Terminology
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> Kevin Ryan wrote:
> 
> | It is in agreement with the correlator folk and also refers to
> | them as 'alerts' -- probably because not all alerts are necessarily
> | alarms (i.e. alarms are subsets of alerts).
> 
> Sorry... but does this mean that "alarms" are "critical alerts"?
> 
> With the (proposed) four types of alerts --- failure, error, warning,
> and informational -- there is a priority that seems implied. It's a bit
> confusing, though.
> 
> What are we trying to capture here: a notion of urgency? Amount of
> operator intervention required? Amount of potential observation time lost?
> 
> "information" - requires no action
> "warning"     - potential down-stream problems, but proceeding
> "failure"     - problems, can't continue
> 
> "warning" and "failure", as listed above, seem both to be "errors":
> 
> "error"       - something unexpected
> 
> All of these four tags seems to be associated with an *event* -- the
> system may respond by issuing an *alert* via some notification process.
> 
> We may stick to the convention of calling "alarms" a notification
> process that involves red lights, noise, and electrical shocks to the
> operator.  That anyway is expected to attract the immediate attention of
> an intervening agency.
> 
> If I understand corectly, then we want to aviod saying "alarm" because
> our usage of "alert" is exactly that - a notification process that
> expects a response from someone/thing.
> 
> I don't know if it is worthwhile to distinguish between an *alert* and
> its generating *event*, but I suspect it may be so.
> 
> - - boyd
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