Signing events

[Rob Seaman]

Bob says:

> My work is far more than a "point of view"…

Indeed!  I didn't mean to suggest otherwise.  Rather, I wanted to understand the context of John's interest.

> Dakota has command line tools for sending, receiving, and checking VOEvent messages. It also has a full-up broker that will run as a daemon on any of the above three operating systems.

And I was mentioning Dakota as a good option to somebody in my office earlier today.  The poster from "Eventful Universe" is just down the hallway.

> We operate a broker here (voevent.dc3.com) and can arrange to receive signed events from you and validate the signature, as well as allow publishing based on the presence of your signature.

To confirm the viability of the signing concept, Steve also demonstrated his version at the NVO Summer School in 2005.  I don't believe scalability has been aggressively evaluated for either paradigm.

> Unfortunately, due to the fragmented nature of VOEvent message transport, the only people who will receive your events are the others tied to my broker. Right now that's AAVSO Net and several amateur and low-visibility university observatories that are getting CBAT and NASA/Swift feeds.

In fact, Aaron Price of AAVSO was on that same team.

Regarding transport, I suggest that 2012 will be a good year to start to move forward with this again.  There will be a transient-response session at the LSST all-hands meeting this Summer.  Hotwired III seems most likely for Spring 2013, but that implies that we should move various initiatives forward in 2012 to prime the pumps.

As a beginning, can we get more events funneling into DC3, and more users or brokers receiving its message streams?

Rob