Obsc ore 1.1 WD

Arnold Rots arots at cfa.harvard.edu
Fri Oct 9 22:54:21 CEST 2015


If identical photons are detected by different detectors, then clearly
the detector Id should be one of the pixel axes.

I am not quite sure sure what you mean by soft boundaries, but if
it is a matter of how to translate pulse height into energy, then the
answer should be that pulse height ought to be the pixel axis.

Cheers,

  - Arnold

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Arnold H. Rots                                          Chandra X-ray
Science Center
Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory                   tel:  +1 617 496
7701
60 Garden Street, MS 67                                      fax:  +1 617
495 7356
Cambridge, MA 02138
arots at cfa.harvard.edu
USA
http://hea-www.harvard.edu/~arots/
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------


On Fri, Oct 9, 2015 at 4:47 PM, Tom McGlynn (NASA/GSFC Code 660.1) <
tom.mcglynn at nasa.gov> wrote:

> Arnold Rots wrote:
>
>> I beg to differ.
>> Pixels (or voxels) are coordinate bins for which we provide the value of
>> some dependent variable.
>> That is precisely what we do for photon events, too, except that we
>> enumerate all the pixels for
>> which we have a measurement, rather than provide the dependent variable
>> value in an array
>> where the position in the array implies what the coordinate bins are. And
>> that is another way
>> of describing what I called a sparse cube.
>>
>> I don't think that's right...  Again consider my example with two or more
> photons which have identical times, positions
> and energies.  That's perfectly feasible.  To me a grid as a structure
> implies several aspects:
>    - Pixels in the grid are not repeated
>    - The grid is in some sense regular
>    - Elements of the grid have boundaries with some reasonably simple
> geometry
> I'd see these as generally true for even a sparse grid.  But none of these
> are necessarily true for photon events.
>
> - We can have photon events with identical characteristics so that if they
> are treated as grid elements
> then the grid elements must be repeated.
> - Conversely the characteristics of detected photons can be wildly
> different, so that the bounding
> ranges of the energy/position/time vary wildly from photon to photon there
> is no sense of regularity in the grid
> - Although the photons may nominally be assigned some energy or position,
> the bounds of the energy
> position can be very soft and very complexly shaped so that any attempt to
> treat the photon as
> bounded by some kind of rectilinear boundaries is wrong. While Chandra
> photons may be nicely bounded,
> Fermi, EGRET and CompTel photon events exhibit these last two
> characteristics in increasingly dramatic ways.
>
> I don't dispute that you can shoehorn events into a sparse grid structure
> but I think it conceals rather than reveals their
> underlying nature, and I think trying to accommodate these kinds of events
> if going to warp the underlying structure
> where grids make sense.
>
>     Tom
>
>
>
>
>
> For instance, for Chandra data we provide the time stamp of the time bin
>> (which does have a
>> definite finite size), the CCD pixel coordinates, and the quantized
>> energy of the photons.
>> To me, that is a perfect example of a list of enumerated pixels.
>> Whenever we measure things and express them digitally, we are effectively
>> binning, either
>> because we truncate, or because we round the value. And that means that
>> we are projecting
>> our information on a pixel grid.
>>
>> Let me be clear: I am not trying to make things more complicated; rather,
>> I prefer to define
>> our concepts in such a way that in a generalization as much as possible
>> is covered.
>> That does not mean that all possible special cases need to be
>> implemented, but that we
>> keep the top level definition in mind when we implement, so that we won't
>> find ourselves
>> later in a situation where we either can't accommodate an important use
>> case, or have to
>> go to extreme lengths to fit a round peg into a square hole.
>>
>> Cheers,
>>
>>   - Arnold
>>
>>
>> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>> Arnold H. Rots Chandra X-ray Science Center
>> Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory tel:  +1 617 496 7701
>> 60 Garden Street, MS 67   fax:  +1 617 495 7356
>> Cambridge, MA 02138 arots at cfa.harvard.edu <mailto:arots at cfa.harvard.edu>
>> USA http://hea-www.harvard.edu/~arots/ <
>> http://hea-www.harvard.edu/%7Earots/>
>>
>> --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>>
>>
>> On Fri, Oct 9, 2015 at 6:40 AM, François Bonnarel <
>> francois.bonnarel at astro.unistra.fr <mailto:
>> francois.bonnarel at astro.unistra.fr>> wrote:
>>
>>     Hi all,
>>          The discussion to decide if an "event list" is a sparse cube
>>     because it is actually also a set of measurements or something
>>     radically different because it is made of photons is subtle.
>>          In any case, i think at the discovery purpose it is not
>>     really easy and usefull to code the number of events in one of the
>>     "dim" columns we have.
>>     Adding a new one to do so ? Or waiting for a model to describe
>>     this. I clearly prefer the second solution
>>     So "event list" in the dataproduct-type and NULL (or some other
>>     undetermined value) in the dim fields should be enough at this stage
>>     Cheers
>>     François
>>
>>     Le 08/10/2015 20:53, Louys Mireille a écrit :
>>
>>         Dear Tom, dear list members,
>>
>>         I think I also support your point of view.
>>
>>         Pixels or let say numerical elements along one characterized axis
>>         of a science ready data product  are the result of a sampling
>>         step in the detectors, followed eventually by  a projection in a
>>         specified coordinate system.
>>         An event , as far as is the physical phenomenon that is
>>         converted/projected into a grid element.
>>
>>         There are scientific features needed for a safe and rich
>>         interpretation of the content of data set, that are not
>>         covered in Obscore.
>>         for instance :
>>         - the signal to noise ratio in flux,
>>         - the number on non null channels in a spectra
>>         - the detection limit for a source in an image
>>         - correlation factors between spaxels in a cube ,
>>         - the proportion of good time intervals in a CTA observation,
>>         - the spatial density of detected sources in an image or cube
>>         ( crowding factor- probably there should be a better english
>>         name for that, sorry )
>>         etc
>>         ...
>>         all this information is closer to the astronomers concerns for
>>         advanced dataset selection, but is context dependent.
>>         I think the number of events in an event list belongs to this
>>         category.
>>
>>         This could be interesting to explore further use-cases for
>>         these specialized physical features  about the data content.
>>
>>         ObsCore should keep its general properties for global
>>         discovery , and CubeDM could tackle the 'interpretation
>>         profile' for various kinds of observation.
>>
>>         Best regards , Mireille
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>         Le 08/10/2015 19:45, Tom McGlynn (NASA/GSFC Code 660.1) a écrit :
>>
>>             I confess that I find this a bit weird. E.g., consider a
>>             telescope with several coaligned photon-counting detectors
>>             (so multiple
>>             detectors are looking at the same or overlapping fields of
>>             view).
>>
>>             After I combine detectors I can have sets of multiple
>>             photons with identical energy, time, and position.  The
>>             photons may have been detected in different detectors
>>             originally, but the scientist has thrown that information
>>             away as irrelevant.  The whole idea of a grid to me is
>>             that we only see each grid element once, but now we have
>>             the same grid element showing up multiple times.  To me a
>>             grid value intrinsically
>>             represents some kind of integration over the grid
>>             area/volume. Events typically represent discrete photons.
>>          While there may be errors associated with the measurement
>>             of the characteristics of the photon (and Heisenberg
>>             suggests that there will be!) a photon is a different
>>             class of beast than a grid element.   It's sort of like
>>             saying that when we are taking a census of people we
>>             should treat them as a grid of times and places of birth.
>>          We could do so but seeing the grid as the underlying
>>             structure seems wrong...
>>
>>                 Regards,
>>                 Tom McGlyn
>>
>>             Laurent Michel wrote:
>>
>>                 Arnold
>>
>>
>>                 I agree with your remark. Event lists can be
>>                 classified sparse cube. However, we do not have in
>>                 Obscore a column giving a the product class (pixelated
>>                 or not, sparse cube). We just have a product_type
>>                 column with a limited vocabulary. There is no field
>>                 giving explicitly  the product class which could help
>>                 to interpret correctly the content of the S-T-E axes.
>>
>>                 For now the point is to decide whether I) it's better
>>                 to complete Obscore 1.1  with just the *dim and the
>>                 extended list of product_type or II) whether we have
>>                 to target a better description of these new categories
>>                 of data products (new in term of Obscore) .
>>                 In my opinion, the option I) is safer until the event
>>                 lists are better taken into account and modelled in
>>                 the VO.
>>
>>                 Bye
>>                 Laurent
>>
>>                 Le 05/10/2015 18:48, Arnold Rots a écrit :
>>
>>                     I don't think event lists should be classified as
>>                     /non-pixelated/.
>>                     If we want to model data consistently, they should
>>                     be classified as /pixel lists/:
>>                     each event is a pixel; we just end up with a
>>                     sparse hypercube.
>>                     If we were to add one more parameter: the total
>>                     number of pixels in
>>                     the data product, that would solve the problem.
>>                     For solid cubes it
>>                     would be the product of the *dims, for event lists
>>                     the number of events.
>>
>>                        - Arnold
>>
>>
>> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>>                     Arnold H. Rots Chandra X-ray Science Center
>>                     Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory        tel:
>>                     +1 617 496 7701 <tel:%2B1%20617%20496%207701>
>>                     60 Garden Street, MS 67 fax: +1 617 495 7356
>>                     <tel:%2B1%20617%20495%207356>
>>                     Cambridge, MA 02138 arots at cfa.harvard.edu
>>                     <mailto:arots at cfa.harvard.edu>
>>                     <mailto:arots at cfa.harvard.edu
>>                     <mailto:arots at cfa.harvard.edu>>
>>                     USA http://hea-www.harvard.edu/~arots/
>>                     <http://hea-www.harvard.edu/%7Earots/>
>>
>> --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>>
>>
>>                     On Mon, Oct 5, 2015 at 11:00 AM, Laurent Michel
>>                     <laurent.michel at astro.unistra.fr
>>                     <mailto:laurent.michel at astro.unistra.fr>
>>                     <mailto:laurent.michel at astro.unistra.fr
>>
>>                     <mailto:laurent.michel at astro.unistra.fr>>> wrote:
>>
>>                         Hello,
>>
>>                         A consensus seems to be taking shape about the
>>                     model evolution for pixelated data:
>>                           + Adding several fields to provide the
>>                     dimensionality in each domain.  (s_dim, em_dim,
>>                     etc) as described in the draft
>>                           + These are added as 'required' fields.. so
>>                     must be populated for all records
>>                           + These fields provide for instance the size
>>                     of each image axis.
>>
>>                         These new fields can however not be used to
>>                     provide a robust representation the dimension of
>>                     non pixelated data (e.g. number
>>                         of event in an event list)
>>
>>                         The proposal to complete the version would be:
>>                           1) To keep the new *dim* fields
>>                           2) To support the EventList and other non
>>                     pixelated as product_type
>>                           3) To clearly specify that the *dim* columns
>>                     must be set with NaN for non pixelated data.
>>                           4) To provide some use cases about
>>                     discovering non pixelated data with ObsTap
>>
>>                         That would quiclky allow us to start the RFC
>>                     period for ObsCore without having to wait on a
>>                     agreement about how to model non
>>                         pixelated data
>>
>>
>>                         Laurent
>>
>>                         --
>>                         jesuischarlie
>>
>>                         Laurent Michel
>>                         SSC XMM-Newton
>>                         Tél : +33 (0)3 68 85 24 37
>>                     <tel:%2B33%20%280%293%2068%2085%2024%2037>
>>                     <tel:%2B33%20%280%293%2068%2085%2024%2037>
>>                         Fax : +33 (0)3 )3 68 85 24 32
>>                     laurent.michel at astro.unistra.fr
>>                     <mailto:laurent.michel at astro.unistra.fr>
>>                     <mailto:laurent.michel at astro.unistra.fr
>>                     <mailto:laurent.michel at astro.unistra.fr>>
>>                     <mailto:laurent.michel at astro.unistra.fr
>>                     <mailto:laurent.michel at astro.unistra.fr>
>>                         <mailto:laurent.michel at astro.unistra.fr
>>                     <mailto:laurent.michel at astro.unistra.fr>>>
>>                         Université de Strasbourg <http://www.unistra.fr>
>>                         Observatoire Astronomique
>>                         11 Rue de l'Université
>>                         F - 67200 Strasbourg
>>
>> http://amwdb.u-strasbg.fr/HighEnergy/spip.php?rubrique34
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>
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