VOEvent Spring 05 workshop?

[Alasdair Allan]

Joshua,

Joshua Bloom wrote:
> It would be good for us to formalize and energized some short and 
> medium term plans for VOEvents. This forum is a great start but it is 
> worth thinking about a 1-2 days workshop where participants can meet 
> face to face to hash and hack. First, is there in interest in this for 
> the spring (March?)?  Second, can anyone volunteer to host a workshop? 
> There are a number of folks West of the Rockies so California (or 
> Vegas!) is probably close to the weighted centroid...

Actually this suggestion comes at a good time!

A joint proposal between eSTAR and Robonet-1.0 Projects in the UK, the 
MONET Project in Europe, the RAPTOR Project (Los Alamos Laboratory) and 
SGM Project (NASA Advanced Architectures and Automation Group) in the 
States has just been successful in gaining funding to hold a workshop 
to agree protocols for handling "event" notification and market 
transactions between robotic telescopes and telescope networks.

Having talked to Roy at the recent AstroGrid rollout meeting, we agreed 
that the existing RTML standards developed by the robotic telescope 
community should probably form the basis of any further work on the 
VOEvent standard. Especially since the RTML is almost certainly going 
to turn into the standard lingua franca of the robotic telescope world, 
and many of the projects involved are already in the process of 
deploying real hardware (and software) on the ground to monitor 
transient events. These projects will be both creating and responding 
to triggers, however whilst rapid response and followup are important 
to us, they are only part of the capabilities that we are developing 
for robotic networks.

For more information about the development, and history, of the RTML 
standard see Rick Hessman's pages at 
http://www.uni-sw.gwdg.de/~hessman/RTML

Our workshop will be held in Edinburgh (UK), at the National e-Science 
Centre (NeSC) in early summer 2005. There will be some funding 
available to support travel and subsistence of attendees. We hope to 
see you there as we believe this workshop will make a good deal of 
progress to provide interoperability between the many projects, and a 
firm VOEvent standard could be agreed there, as we will ensure that the 
standards developed at this workshop will link into the UK AstroGrid 
Project, and the European VOTech Project since we are members of both 
of these collaborations.

Cheers,
Alasdair.
-- 
Dr. A. Allan, School of Physics, University of Exeter