VOEvent II summary, part 1

[Rob Seaman]

On Dec 12, 2005, at 8:50 PM, Rob Seaman wrote:

> Finally, I had contacted Dan Green of the Central Bureau of  
> Astronomical Telegrams as well as his colleagues at the Minor  
> Planet Center and the International Comet Quarterly.  These  
> organizations have long experience alerting the community to  
> transient events as well as serving as the official IAU naming  
> bodies.  Over the past few decades the meaning of the word "timely"  
> as in "timely alerts" has changed drastically.  A mechanism such as  
> the various IAU circulars - whether delivered electronically or via  
> physical telegrams - that relies on a model of human peer review is  
> simply not appropriate for many of the science drivers of VOEvent  
> such as GRB follow-up.  On the other hand, we have a lot of work to  
> do before a VOEvent packet can comfortably represent the rich  
> semantics of the natural language circulars.

I should add that Dan Green and the IAU centers thought VOEvent  
important enough for four staff members to attend the videocon:  Dan  
representing CBAT, Gareth Williams of the MPC, and Arne Henden and  
Aaron Price of the AAVSO.  Aaron was also at the NVO summer school  
and worked on the VOEvent student project with Ashish, Rob and Steve  
Allen who participated in the workshop, along with Avi Fhima and  
Jorge Garcia of Gemini who were absent.

One anticipates that organizations such as CBAT, MPC, ICQ and AAVSO  
will continue to issue whatever data products they desire (alerts and  
otherwise) in whatever formats they wish.  An agile, robust,  
comprehensive VOEvent will, however, also provide a separate  
opportunity for these authorities to publish richly meaningful,  
interoperable alert messages with minimal latency, as well as  
providing users with a many layered set of tools to allow them to  
benefit from the flow of events and their follow-ups.  The VO doesn't  
seek to supplant previous entities such as the IAU centers, far from  
it - but the intent to shake things up is certainly inherent in  
everything the VO pursues.

Rob

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