VOEvent query language (SEAP?)

[Elizabeth Auden]

>> I'm working on a VOTech science case to match VOEvent packets with 
>> observations from Aladin described by the Characterization schema.
>
> What does this mean precisely?  In terms a fourth grader - or an astronomer - 
> could fathom?

The science case should work two ways:

1. Astronomer has a favourite event (say, a microlensing event published 
in the OGLE feed) or just really likes microlensing events. The astronomer 
wants to find all observations of the same part of the sky where the event 
took place

a. The astronomer may want spatial matches only - was anything interesting 
happening 20 years before or 20 years after the event?
b. The astronomer may want a spatial and a temporal match - perhaps he or 
she is looking for observatories / satellites that serendipitously caught 
the event other than the observatory spelled out by the VOEvent WhereWhen 
metadata.
c. The astronomer may want instruments with the same spectral bandpasses 
(did Swift and XMM observe that x-ray flare?), or he or she may be looking 
for different spectral information (did any optical instruments happen to 
catch an optical afterglow of last week's GRB?)

2. The astronomer may have a set of observations - say, 2MASS data - and 
he or she wonders if these observations happened to catch any interesting 
events. A similar set of use cases applies - the astronomer may want the 
same spatial location in the sky, but a different spectral or temporal 
view.

The cases that people have suggested to me involving observations and 
events with different spatial coordinates are primarily solar and STP - 
did a coronal mass ejection at location A on the Sun precede a magnetic 
event at Earth magnetosphere location B?


I'm hoping to add more detail (and more interesting queries) to these 
cases before June. More interesting will be giving the knowledgebase a 
chance to match up all the events and observations in the knowledgebase, 
not just specific "find observations to match *this* event" type queries.

I think my battery is about to die, so I'll stop here for the moment.

Elizabeth

-- 
Elizabeth Auden, MSSL
Holmbury St. Mary, Dorking RH5 6NT
Tel: +44 (0)1483 204 276
eSDO Technical Lead, AstroGrid Developer