[evla-sw-discuss] Terminology

[Boyd Waters]

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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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