VOEvent 20110215 notes

[Bob Denny]

Just going on the record here (responding to N Gray):

> Just before section 1.1, you mention transport mechanisms.  You've noted that VOEvent doesn't define transport mechanisms, but I think the reader here would be at least interested in any discussion of the various tradeoffs and experience here.  Is that published anywhere (and if it's not, shouldn't such an article be in PASP or at least on arXiv?)

Selfishly I would at least mention VOEvent Transport, a protocol designed
specifically for VOEvent and using the simplest of mechanisms, a TCP socket.

http://www.ivoa.net/Documents/Notes/VOEventTransport/

Even more selfishly, I would mention the existence of a cross-platform reference
implementation of this protocol in the form of a set of tools including sender,
receiver, and broker:

http://www.ivoa.net/Documents/Notes/DakotaBroker/

The above also implements digisig validation and publisher authentication using
the proposed digital signature method in

http://www.ivoa.net/Documents/latest/VOEventDigiSig.html

> Sect 3.2.3: Are you accepting _all_ of ISO-8601?  I hope not.  The W3C ISO-8601 profile might be better <http://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-datetime.html>, aka W3CDTF.  Or even something more restricted than that.

I would strongly suggest we explicitly adopt the date/time format as understood
by XML (type="xs:dateTime"). This is indeed a sub-set of ISO-8601. Straying from
this would preclude machine parsing of dates within an XML code/object-model
binding.

  -- Bob