VOEvent II summary, part 2

Wed Dec 14 06:39:42 PST 2005

Messages which made it to the VOEvent list are at:
http://ivoa.net/forum/voevent/0512/date.htm

One 'part 1' and one 're: part 1' plus this one.

T.

  _____  

From: owner-voevent at eso.org [mailto:owner-voevent at eso.org] On Behalf Of Rob
Seaman
Sent: 14 December 2005 13:11
To: Alasdair Allan
Cc: IVOA List VOEvent
Subject: Re: VOEvent II summary, part 2

Hi Alasdair,

I only seem to have a "part 2" message and not a "part 1", or in fact a
"part 3" which you mention in part 2?

I'm only half finished with part 3 - we covered a lot of territory on
Wednesday. I'll append part 1 (and a follow-up).

I'm copying the VOEvent list (not the core list). Can somebody confirm that
they get this message - and got the previous two part 1 messages? (And part
2 for that matter.)

Rob
----

From: seaman at noao.edu
Subject: VOEvent II summary, part 1
Date: December 12, 2005 8:50:10 PM MST
To: voevent at ivoa.net
Reply-To: seaman at noao.edu

Hola,

I've been under the weather the last few days and writing this has been
moving like molasses. It seems best to send what I have at the moment,
mostly Monday and Tuesday and send a separate message discussing Wednesday's
mini-interop in the next couple of days. Don't wait for me, however.

Bottom line: great workshop! Thanks to everybody for making it so. Credit
for the excellent choice of food, etc., goes to Kathy Glockner. Thanks to
NVO, LSST and NOAO for paying for it. Pete Marenfeld of the NOAO photo shop
made the cool poster. VOEvent remains one of the VO's hot tickets. Current
thinking is to hold VOEvent III in June, with the venue shifting a few
hundred miles further east.

Capsule comments follow on the speakers. Presentations and links (and the
workshop photo) are available from the twiki:

 <http://www.ivoa.net/twiki/bin/view/IVOA/VoeventWorkshop2>
http://www.ivoa.net/twiki/bin/view/IVOA/VoeventWorkshop2

Roy Williams opened the workshop with comments and intros. The basic status
is that a dozen more people would have attended except for various
conflicts. Several groups are pursuing active development centered on
VOEvent. These include not only traditional VO partners, but traditional
"real" observatories like UKIRT/JCMT, Gemini and CTIO.

Managed to deliver my slides on the state of the specification in about 20
minutes. Took me an hour and a half the week before at a staff meeting. Lots
of good work has been done on the spec. Lots remains to do.

Alasdair Allan covered a vast amount of territory related to our baseline
use case of rapid robotic response. Much discussion resulted and we spent
close to an hour thrashing things about with great abandon. Robert White
filled in some more details of the TALON/eSTAR collaboration. Seems to be
quite healthy. More on various related issues when the Wednesday
mini-interop is discussed.

We decided to ditch the demonstrations from the schedule. Various folks did
include demos in their presentations. Phil Warner of NOAO was busy at the
far end of the table doing battle with JMS and Java. You may have heard Bugs
Bunny coming from my end of the table during one of the breaks on Tuesday -
that was a VOEvent packet arriving via Phil's server.

Scott Barthelmy brought us up-to-date with GCN activities. GCN-2 is to be
layered directly upon VOEvent. Scott later rescheduled his flight to be able
to attend the Wednesday session. It can't be overstated how important GCN
has been to the success of VOEvent.

Chris Smith provided the first talk focused on science. I hope science
always remains an emphasis of even highly "technical" discussions in the VO.
Chris talked about SNe from the NOAO ESSENCE, SuperMACHO and DES surveys as
well as microlensing events from SM. In late breaking news, these alerts
should indeed be hitting the VOEvent pavement as a result of the deeply
appreciated support of an NVO research initiative grant submitted by Phil,
Chris and me.

The original agenda included a half dozen discussion sessions on specific
topics. The discussions were very successful throughout the three days, but
were connected to the agenda in only the loosest possible fashion.

Frossie Economou picked up after lunch with a repeat of her successful
comments from the ADASS VOEvent BoF session. She delivered her talk remotely
via polycom from Hilo. The system for rapid response to alerts at UKIRT and
JCMT provides a very interesting use case separate from robotic follow-up.
Kim Gillies had talked about the rapid response queue at Gemini at ADASS,
but wasn't able to attend this workshop. Gemini may already be implementing
VOEvent based infrastructure in support of their queue. It should be a
priority to continue this collaboration with the classically scheduled O/IR
(and sub-mm) large glass (and aluminum or steel).

I had contacted folks from many of the observatories that are local to
Tucson. This included Richard Green, now at LBT. Mark Wagner delivered a
great overview of how operations at LBT might connect to VOEvent. It
certainly is a fascinating telescope and I was left wondering if there might
be some follow-up use cases specific to optical interferometry or to having
duplicate instrumentation on dual eight meter telescopes.

Arnold Rots discussed the current status of STC. We continued the discussion
at various points over the remainder of the workshop. It is critical that we
reach a consensus on space-time coordinates. It sounds like a possible
consensus is in sight through the use of XLink and embedding single
coordinate elements within a <value2>.

Frank Hill delivered another excellent talk focused on science, specifically
solar astronomy and the Virtual Solar Observatory. Have to believe that both
solar and nighttime events should be supported by the same semantic and
transport mechanism. In general, any opportunity for the IVO and the VSO to
work together should be seized.

LSST was the third sponsor (with NVO and NOAO) and Kem Cook continued the
discussion of microlensing events opened by Chris Smith. GCN is
bootstrapping the VOEvent standard and network. LSST provides a target for
our vision of where we should be in 5-10 years. Events - interesting events
- are central to the concept of LSST.

Excellent dinner and company at "Cuvee World Bistro". Enjoyed coffee
afterward - even had a chance to sit down after a while.

A thought at the end of day one: pawns are the soul of chess - follow-up
observations are the soul of VOEvent. The semantics of describing the
observation of a transient are interesting by themselves, of course - but
there is no reason except for follow-up that such shouldn't simply be stored
in and retrieved from a more traditional archive or database.

The second day opened with a session exploring the breadth of VOEvent, with
Robyn Allsman giving an update on LSST's plans for generating transient
alerts. Nat Butler followed with a discussion of GRB alerts from HETE, and
Ashish Mahabal talked about near Earth asteroid alerts from NEAT. The
semantics of the various event types are very rich. The quantities of
packets to be generated within a few years is very large. It is a safe bet
that VOEvent will remain a priority in both the virtual and real worlds.

After the break, Matthew Graham and Andrew Drake filied us in regarding
VOEventNet and such technology as Jabber. Alasdair responded with happenings
in the Heterogeneous Telescope Network. I won't belabor these robust
projects since others will be reporting back regularly on their progress.

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.

More later...

Rob

---------

From: seaman at noao.edu
Subject: Re: VOEvent II summary, part 1
Date: December 13, 2005 1:11:43 AM MST
To: voevent at ivoa.net
Reply-To: seaman at noao.edu

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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