UN Science Workshop in Tokyo, June, 2007

[Silvia Dalla]

Dear Rob,

as you mention there is plenty of scope for interaction of
VOEvent with the Heliospheric and Ionospheric community.

However, I am not entirely clear about what you mean with 
'VOEvent is a reasonable choice for reporting almost any time 
sequence of measurements'. Please could you elaborate?

There have been efforts to standardise data formats for time
series data - one such standard, becoming more and more popular, 
is CDF:
http://cdf.gsfc.nasa.gov/
 
Another data format that is in use is the CEDAR one, used
especially for ionospheric data, eg:
http://www.openmadrigal.org/

I don't think there is currently a standard way of reporting 
events, nor of querying for data within a specified time
range - this is why we drafted the Simple Time Access Protocol
proposal:
http://wiki.astrogrid.org/bin/view/Astrogrid/SimpleTimeAccessProtocol

Best wishes,
Silvia

------------------------------------
Silvia Dalla
School of Physics and Astronomy
University of Manchester
PO Box 88
Manchester M60 1QD
UK

Tel +44-161-306 8705
Fax +44-161-306 3922
------------------------------------

On Sun, 22 Apr 2007, Rob Seaman wrote:

> >Anybody planning to attend this workshop?
> 
> From:
> 
> 	http://solarwww.mtk.nao.ac.jp/UNBSS_Tokyo07/
> 
> click on through to:
> 
> 	http://ihy2007.org
> 
> and then to:
> 
> 	http://ihy2007.org/observatory/observatory.shtml
> 
> which is an extensive list of instrumentation meant "to provide global
> measurements of ionospheric and heliospheric phenomena".  It occurs to me that
> one thing we haven't focused enough attention on is that VOEvent is a
> reasonable choice for reporting almost any time sequence of measurements.  The
> reporting of short latency transient alerts is only one use case.
> 
> In particular, one has to believe that the fifteen different remotely sited
> IHY instrument data streams are each completely different in format and
> transport.  Many are undoubtedly conceived purely as data recorders for later
> retrieval - VOEvent would be an unlikely choice due to the storage overhead of
> XML.  But others may report each measurement in turn, or on some regular
> schedule.  Simply standardizing the format for such a joint/community
> initiative has a significant value.  Several of these instruments appear to
> have a "classic" transient reporting aspect at any rate.
> 
> Rob
>