[voeventnet] Re: URLs?

[Matthew Graham]

Joshua Bloom wrote:

>
> 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

Hi Josh,

We're prototyping a repository for VOEvents here and are trying to 
connect up to as many feeds as there are to remove this reliance on 
potential single-point failures. There is a form-based search interface 
to allow you to retrieve specific packets, see which packets cite a 
particular packet, do a spatial search for packets, i.e. retrieve all 
packets within a particular RA and Dec range and do a conceptual search 
for packets based on the VOConcepts list. You will also be able to 
subscribe to the repository and only receive packets which match some 
user-defined filters. I am hoping that we might have a demo/prototype up 
in time for AAS!

    Cheers,

    Matthew