VOEvent Workshop, update

[Roy Williams]

This note serves as an update on the upcoming VOEvent workshop. The original 
announcement is attached below, including the web page, containing further 
information.

(1) Practicality
The Caltech Faculty club (Athenaeum) has no more rooms. If you do not have a place to 
stay for the meeting, please see the list of hotels listed at the web page. You are 
invited to a nice dinner on Wednesday evening. My colleague Sarah Emery Bunn 
sarah at cacr.caltech.edu has kindly agreed to help VOEvent people with practical 
arrangements or other procedural matters.

(2) Registration
If you are intending to come to the workshop and your name is not in the list below, 
please reply to me with your intention.

(3) Are you in the agenda?
We are in the process of making an agenda, with some names sketched in already. The 
aim of the workshop is to define the nature of messages that announce or follow up on 
Immediate Astronomical Events (VOEvents). The way that systems create or respond to 
such messages is only of interest if it affects that nature of the message. Therefore 
I would like to ask if you would like to give a short presentation that is relevant 
to the stated aim of the workshop, and if so, what would be a working title?

(4) Focus Areas
The discussions will help us to answer the "Focus Areas" listed below. I would be 
most grateful if you all could think through these questions before the meeting. We 
will have a discussion on these, and you will have opportunity to express those 
thoughts. I would like to get email comments on these from those unable to attend the 
workshop.

Focus Area 1:
What are the purposes of a system that exchanges information about immediate 
astronomical events (VOEvents). How and why should we search and subscribe to such a 
feed? How would messages be generated from one telescope and be used to drive another 
telescope? What can be done with a federation of VOEvent data from different sources? 
(eg searching LIGO/GRB databases? Xray flash followed by optical transient?)

Focus Area 2:
What is the semantic structure of a VOEvent message? Is the "Who, When, Where, What, 
How" paradigm the correct one? How should existing schema be integrated? Please try 
to read the existing draft semantics:
http://www.ivoa.net/internal/IVOA/IvoaVOEvent/VOEvent-0.3.htm

Focus Area 3:
How can we make a set of adjectives ("ontology") that can be used to describe a 
VOEvent (eg supernova, planetary volcano, magnitude increase, etc)

Focus Area 4:
How can we build a system that exchanges VOEvent messages for the purposes that we 
uncover in Focus Area 1? What are the softeare components, protocols, and messages? 
What is the security infrastructure (if any)? Who can create and inject messages into 
the system? Who can read, subscribe, and query the messages?

Looking forward to seeing you in a few weeks.
Roy Williams

-------------------------------------------------------------
Current known participants:

Alasdair Allan aa at astro.ex.ac.uk
 Ian Atkinson <ian.atkinson at jcu.edu.au>
Tim Axelrod taxelrod at lsst.org
Scott Barthelmy scott at milkyway.gsfc.nasa.gov
Vasily Belokurov vasily at ast.cam.ac.uk
Joshua Bloom jbloom at cfa.harvard.edu
George Djorgovski george at astro.caltech.edu
Mike Fitzpatrick fitz at noao.edu
Derek Fox derekfox at astro.caltech.edu
Matthew Graham mjg at cacr.caltech.edu
Frederic Hessman Hessman at Astro.physik.Uni-Goettingen.de
Scott Koranda skoranda at gravity.phys.uwm.edu
Szabolcs Marka smarka at phys.columbia.edu
Carl Pennypacker crpennypacker at lbl.gov
Tom Vestrand vestrand at lanl.gov
Robert White rwhite at lanl.gov
Roy Williams roy at caltech.edu
Przemyslaw Wozniak wozniak at lanl.gov

----- Original Message ----- 
From: Roy Williams
To: voevent at ivoa.net
Cc: ivoa at ivoa.net
Sent: Wednesday, January 19, 2005 10:55 AM
Subject: VOEvent Workshop, April 13/14 Pasadena


You are warmly invited to the:
VOEvent Workshop
sponsored by the International Virtual Observatory Alliance

Dates:
Weds 13th and Thurs 14th April 2005
please mark your diary

Location:
CACR, California Instittute of Technology
http://www.cacr.caltech.edu/find_us.html

Web page:
http://www.ivoa.net/twiki/bin/view/IVOA/VoeventWorkshop

Registration:
Please send email to Roy Williams (roy at caltech.edu).

Mailing list:
Even if you can't come to the workshop, please sign up to the VOEvent mailing list 
(send the message "subscribe voevent" to majordomo at ivoa.net)

Agenda:
-- Define scope and reach a consensus on the semantic content of a discovery/followup 
message for an immediate sky event. This will be based on the existing draft at the 
IVOA Twiki.

-- Consideration of serializing such a message into XML components, with re-use of 
existing schema where relevant.

-- Language by which clients could subscribe to a VOEvent server, with fine control 
over which messages are to be received.

-- Database and transport technologies for carrying VOEvent messages.

-- How existing systems could have a VOEvent capability.added with maximal 
functionality and minimal effort.

-- Finding volunteers to set up prototype systems.


--------
California Institute of Technology
roy at caltech.edu
626 395 3670