New UCDs for VOEvent please

[Roy Williams]

Dear Andrea and Sebastien

This note is to ask the UCD working group for help in building a new 
section of the UCD vocabulary in support of the VOEvent working group.

The first meeting of the VOEvent WG was last week in Pasadena, with the 
objective of describing "immediate astronomical events" in a 
semantically-meaningful way. One of the parts of that schema is 
parameters that say what was observed, and another part is a 
"hypothesis" of what astrophysics may be behind the event. As an 
example, what was observed could be a "mag 17 source in galaxy X that 
was not there last week", and the hypothesis could be "supernova".

We would like the "hypothesis" section to be based on a standard 
vocabulary, so that people can select and query based on these words. In 
other words, we would like a UCD section covering astronomical event 
types. Could you help us with doing this? Perhaps a meeting at the Kyoto 
IVOA would be appropriate? I cannot be there, but Arnold Rots and 
Alasdair Allen could speak for VOEvent.

In the meeting last week, we came up with the words below as a start. It 
is in two parts -- the astrophysical objects, and the actual events that 
relate to the objects.

Roy Williams
California Institute of Technology
626 395 3670




** Object types
    AGN,
    Binaries,
    Black Holes,
    Globular Clusters,
    Pulsars,
    Quasars,
    Neutron Stars,
    Supernova Remnants,
    Soft Gamma-ray Repeaters, 
    Planets (minor),  
    Comets,
    Meteors,

** Events
(includes discovery of the above and...)
    Solar flares
    Cataclysmic Variables report
    Gamma-Ray Bursts,
    Supernovae,
    Microlensing Events,
    Novae,
    Outbursts Of Unusual Variable Stars,
    Cepheid period change
        change from what?
    Inspirals
    Xray burst
    LIGO burst
    neutrino
    planetary transit
    pulsar glitch


References

-- IVOA VOEvent Working Group
http://www.ivoa.net/twiki/bin/view/IVOA/IvoaVOEvent
Presentations are available at
http://www.ivoa.net/twiki/bin/view/IVOA/VOEventSchedule

-- IVOA Unified Content Descriptors
http://www.ivoa.net/Documents/latest/UCD.html
http://cdsweb.u-strasbg.fr/UCD/ucd1p-words.txt

-- Two example VOEvents are here:
http://www.ivoa.net/internal/IVOA/VoeventWorkshop/voevent_example.xml
http://www.ivoa.net/internal/IVOA/VoeventWorkshop/voevent_example_smallest.xml
(if this XML renders badly in your browser, choose "View/Source")