URLs?

[Joshua Bloom]

On Dec 8, 2005, at 3:25 PM, Alasdair Allan wrote:
>
> I think we've moved to a much more decentralised network, and in my  
> opinion this is a good thing! Rob was taking notes during the mini- 
> interop and I think we should wait for him to push these to the  
> group before moving forward with this discussion to bring everyone  
> up to speed with what we discussed there (we got through a lot of  
> stuff).
>

    I am pleased to know that we're moving to a "much more  
decentralised network." Getting feeds from multiple sources, even if  
there is substantial overlap, is the only way to insure proper follow- 
up. For those of you not working on GRBs on a day to day basis, you  
might not be aware of a fault that occurred on Dec 21 UT with the GCN  
socket notifications. Though it was quickly repaired, the community  
missed out on learning of the RT localization of one of the brightest  
bursts detected by Swift that was of a very special type ("short- 
hard"). I triggered the PAIRITEL telescope by hand once reading a  
human generated circular but we would have observed the source  
seconds after the burst, not 1 hour after had there been multiple  
feeds to the telescope.

   The GCN has amazing up time (~99%) and it is simply bad luck that  
something went wrong when one of the monster bursts occurred, but I  
think we need to view this instance as a strong impetus to remove  
single failure points from VOEventNet.  To start the ball rolling on  
this point, I had asked Nat Butler in November to discuss with the  
HETE team the possibility of them autogenerating VOEvents and  
distributing them directly from the **ground stations** (in addition  
to sending info to Goddard). I've begun proselytizing to other major  
event providers (both current and future) to this effect. Once a  
network of aggregators and relay boxes exists, this will insure that  
those that want to hear of VOevents will, with as much reliability as  
the internet can provide. Again, looking into the crystal ball, I  
suspect that the VOEventNet topology will/should look like the  
architecture of the internet itself (*).

   Apologizes for my long radio silence. Nat Butler speaks great  
things about the Tuscon meeting!

josh

(*) http://images.google.com/images?q=internet%20topology