VOEvent priorities

[Rob Seaman]

It appears that the many diverse activities in the VOEvent *community* may be distracting from what's going on in the VOEvent *working group*.

Just to be clear, the top priority of the working group is to bring VOEvent v2.0 to an IVOA recommendation by the Victoria InterOp in May.  V2.0 is defined by its support for time series (there are a handful of smaller priorities).  The WG chair intends that this support will be provided by minor tweaks (if any are indeed needed) to the Berkeley SimpleTimeSeries.

	Action item:  Rob will distribute a first draft of V2.0 by March 15.

It is the understanding of the chair that there was also a WG consensus to rewrite the VOEvent V2.0 schema to rely on an explicit subset of STC, and in general to better conform to XML best practices.  (The chair thinks the question of whether the prose standard or rather the XML schema is normative is a distraction.  Provide a useful schema and projects will validate against it.)

	Action item:  Volunteers?

VOEvent itself is transport neutral, but various parties in the deployed VOEventNet signed off on a transport agreement in 2005.  That agreement is currently expressed in an IVOA Note: http://www.ivoa.net/Documents/VOEventTransport.  Nothing prevents the distribution of VOEvent packets by other means, but interoperability would be intrinsic to the concept of operations of ANY celestial transient alert system - thus implying the existence of VOEvent brokers capable of bridging between transport regimes.  It is the responsibility of projects that use alternate transport protocols to ensure that such bridges exist.

	Action item:  Schedule a planning meeting for the future of VOEvent infrastructure.

This could be at one or more of the "Eventful Universe" meeting in Tucson in March, at the Victoria InterOp in May, at the San Diego SPIE in June, or at the Boston ADASS in November.  Perhaps all four?  A telecon to start?  What needs to be on such an agenda?

A personal note:  I am in the operations group of Science Data Management at NOAO.  SDM is part of the NOAO System Science Center.  The "System" in that name is the actual U.S. O/IR System of public/private observatories, not some theoretical exercise.  Everything about my job focuses on deploying and operating technology that is actually useful to astronomers.  This is my goal as chair of VOEvent.  I apologize if this has been unclear.

However, there are innumerable important things going on in the VOEvent *community*.  In the community, I am just another schmo pursuing goals (as are we all) that I believe to be important to my particular organization.  I am loathe to create yet another mailing list to carry this traffic since I believe another key priority of the *working group* is precisely to grow such a community.  (Our enthusiastic community is the envy of others in the IVOA.)  If some view such discussions (or the IVOA itself) as a distraction, please understand the points above.

	And finally:  If you see our priorities differently (or you believe I fail to understand some issue entirely), please email the chair (and vice chair) privately.

Rob