NVO Annual Report

[Rob Seaman]

Bob Hanisch says:

> The Annual Report is finished and available for your reading  
> pleasure at
>
>     http://www.us-vo.org/pubs/files/FY05AR.pdf

VOEvent is mentioned 28 times (for comparison, VOTable is mentioned  
20 times).  Some example quotes demonstrate the breadth of our  
efforts and the manifold ways that VOEvent is serving as an enabling  
technology for VO (STC, UCDs, SIAP, ConeSearch, registry, ...):

>> New this year is the VOEvent protocol, driven by the desire to  
>> integrate the notification systems in a variety of research areas  
>> in which quick responses to transient events are necessary.

>> VOEvent discussions have helped to focus the development team on  
>> the importance of the STC and have led to comments
>> during the open Request-for-Comments period.

>> The discussion of semantic dictionaries for astronomical object  
>> types (arising from the VOEvent discussions in early 2005) remains  
>> controversial and has been deferred from the initial IVOA UCD  
>> document.

>> A. Mahabal (Caltech) has constructed a service that parses the  
>> VOEvent XML packet, extracts the id, position and error ellipse  
>> for the event and obtains a list of possible VOEvent contaminants  
>> (e.g. known asteroids and known variable stars) in that area.

>> One of the recommendations of the Pittsburgh team meeting was to  
>> ensure that DataScope was integrated with the development of  
>> VOEvent, so that users had immediate access to information in the  
>> region of interesting events.

>> A specification of the packet semantics and syntax is now a  
>> Working Draft at the IVOA level.

>> A prototype network (VOEventNet) has been funded by NSF as a  
>> collaboration between Caltech, UC Berkeley, and Los Alamos, with  
>> several providers of events, and several follow-up facilities, and  
>> an intelligent system to collate and federate observational and  
>> archive information to make fast, automated decisions on the  
>> importance of a recent event.

>> Seaman and other students at the NVO Summer School won the  
>> technical project prize for a prototype of VOEvent software, and  
>> he will be presenting this at the January 2006 AAS meeting.

"Other students" were Steve Allen (UCO/Lick), Avi Fhima (Gemini  
North), Jorge Garcia (Gemini South), Ashish Mahabal (Caltech) & Aaron  
Price (AAVSO).  Aaron will be presenting at the AAS via the largesse  
of the NVO's $500 travel prize.  This was a heck of a team and the  
NVO-SS was a great experience.

>> A VOEvent BoF was held at ADASS 2005, and a follow-on workshop  
>> will be held at NOAO/Tucson in December.

Your participation will make VOEvent II a success!

Rob