The State of VOEvent

[Rob Seaman]

Howdy,

Thanks to everybody who participated in VOEvent related activities in  
Trieste.  In particular, the great success of VOEvent to date owes  
everything to Roy's able leadership over the past three years.

VOEvent related activities are not slowing down, however, but rather  
are poised to ramp steeply upwards.  No rest for the weary with GLAST  
and Pan-STARRS and Dark Energy Survey and LSST and on and on looming  
over us.  I'll describe the key near-term action items below - as I  
perceive them.  If there are others, please speak up early and often  
to make sure your priorities receive attention from the group.

First, another plug for the unique time domain observing opportunity  
provided by our kind collaborators of the HTN:

	http://www.telescope-networks.org/cfp


ACTION ITEMS:

1) Finalize VOEvent v2.0 by the Fall 2008 InterOp:

A) A key item here is to enhance the VOEvent schema to better support  
time series data.  The hope is that this can benefit from the work  
done for the Spectral Data Model.  We will need a first draft in the  
next month to be ready in time for Baltimore.

B) Another item is to specify the correct handling of STC-based  
orbital elements for our purposes.  STC is pretty clear-cut here, so  
this will mostly consist of demonstrating our ability to capture,  
convey and usefully present orbits from author to subscriber.

C) Formalize the hook for conveying events from outside communities  
using external schema.  This is already happening with the  
Heliophysics Knowledgebase.

D) We have pressed the Semantics WG to advance the vocabulary  
initiative.  They responded admirably.  It is now up to us to make use  
of this.  Let's wrap it up with a pretty bow and put controlled  
vocabularies to use.

E) KML support.  This may only involve allowing an explicit kml type  
for a <Reference>.  It may involve more than that.


2) Initiatives in parallel to v2.0:

A) Authentication.  The sense of the WG in Trieste was that digital  
signatures not be embedded within VOEvent packets themselves.  Two  
distinct technologies have been proposed.  Each has already been  
prototyped.  Now we need a coherent pilot project to carry one or both  
of these forward in a VOEventNet-wide fashion.  There is no reason to  
create a signature if nobody will later check it - this implies  
support of one sort or another within our browsers.  Let's find a  
middle road between racing forward willy-nilly on the one hand - and  
doing nothing at all on the other.  In addition, I'd also like to  
evaluate a lightweight checksum scheme for use within a packet,  
similar to the FITS Checksum convention.

B) Registry support.  Roy identified two types of VOEvent entries, a  
VOEventStream and a VOEventServer.  The first is a scientific entity,  
the second a technical/logistical entity.  VOEvent can benefit even  
more than most VO activities from registering our resources.  We have  
a geographically distributed, multi-purpose community seeking fully  
autonomous operations requiring short latency, high reliability  
notification.  Such a network is not going to be connected up manually  
like tinker-toys.

C) SEAP - the Simple Event Access Protocol, that is - query for  
VOEvent.  Transient alert astronomy brings two additional requirements  
to query protocols:  the specific need to interoperate seamlessly with  
resource discovery (in particular, multiple repositories may host the  
same data), and the defining characteristic of the community of  
issuing rules-based queries in advance of the observations.


3) Ongoing activities:

A) VOEventNet continues to grow.  In fact, transient alert astronomy  
has involved a deployed network of resources since before the Trans- 
Atlantic Cable in 1866.  Our goal is to provide a protocol that can be  
used to represent any astronomical "event" - any report of celestial  
behavior with a time domain component.  This carries within it the  
implicit need to manage the network of publishers and subscribers  
conveying those reports.

B) VO-GCN is the NASA funded project to relayer the Gamma-ray bursts  
Coordinates Network on VOEvent. We (Roy and his co-Is) plan to submit  
a follow-on proposal for the next AISR round.  Much has been  
accomplished, much remains to do.

C) Collaboration with HTN continues, especially through the good  
auspices of eSTAR, but LCOGT is coming up on the outside.  Autonomous  
observing assets seem a very safe bet for the future development of  
the ground-based O/IR system.  They have long been the norm for space- 
based observatories.  Several interesting projects are in the works  
for other parts of the EM spectrum as well as for non-EM experiments  
in GR, neutrinos and high energy particles.  VOEvent should remain  
engaged with all such efforts.

D) Recruitment of new partners with new event streams.  No need to  
belabor this one.


4) Meetings in the coming year:

- HTN-IV - Santa Barbara, July 2008.  A targeted workshop.

- InterOp - Baltimore, October 2008.  Sessions?

- ADASS - Quebec, November 2008.  Tutorial and/or BoF.

- VOEvent IV - Western USA, Spring 2009?

...followed by more InterOps, ADASSes, SPIE meetings, etc.


5) Documentation:

- VOEvent v2.0 standard (and schema) [Seaman]

- VOEvent transport notes [Allan]

- VOEvent vocabulary (as needed to augment IVOAT) [Hessman]

- VOEvent Users Guide [all]

[Lead author in brackets.]

Only the first document is normative.


Anyway, that's how I see the work in front of us for the near to  
medium term.  Over the longer term, the heart of the enterprise should  
shift from simply publishing, transporting, and subscribing to event  
streams, toward semantic characterization and correlation of the  
underlying celestial phenomena.  Autonomous follow-up will begin to  
shade over toward more creative forms of machine decision making.

Please consider how your organization may participate in these  
specific activities - and remind me of items I've neglected to mention.

Rob Seaman
NOAO
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