Light curves in the IVOA

[Douglas Tody]

(Apologies if this is a duplicate; I sent it earlier but it does not
appear to have gone through).


On Tue, 22 Jun 2010, Rob Seaman wrote:

> In particular, VOEvent use cases emphasize the "Simple" in SimpleTimeSeries. 
> A primary goal of v2.0 is a schema that is hardened (and validate-able) for 
> battlefield usage by third party troops.  Much effort has gone into 
> SimpleTimeSeries to make it compatible with that goal.

Hi Rob -

To respond to your specific point: you can satisfy this requirement
of VOEvent in any case.  That is, limit it to light curves if you
want - but you will probably still need some specification of the
particular observable and photometric system.  If you wish, specify
the exact schema elements permitted for the particular XML format
used in VOTable.  This is no problem since the data model can be
subsetted and is representation independent.  This simple subset can
be documented directly as part of VOEvent so that VOEvent users do not
need to deal with the more general VO case (although I would provide
references to the documents dealing with the more general case).
But a client analysis app that supports both VOEVent-embedded light
curves as well as general DAL/DM time series data will then easily
work with both.  We just need a constructor to build a timeSeries
object from the VOEvent packet, and we need to ensure that the common
model used in the two domains is consistent.

  	- Doug