Madrid InterOp roundup

[John Swinbank]

Dear TDIG,

It was great to catch up with some of you at last week’s InterOp in Madrid. For those who couldn’t make it, here’s a brief summary of the TDIG-relevant proceedings.

There was a single time domain session on the Thursday (22 May) afternoon. We focused our discussion around the three standards which are in the process of being produced by the TDIG: SimpleTimeSeries, VOEvent Transport Protocol and VOEventRegExt. On Friday morning, I presented a brief summary of the conclusions. My slides are available from <http://wiki.ivoa.net/internal/IVOA/PlenarySessionsMay2014/20140523-tdig.pdf>.

To summarize: we discussed the note endorsing SimpleTimeSeries which Matthew issued on 13 May. It was agreed that this is a useful interim solution until the appropriate IVOA standards for publishing time-series data becoming available [1]. It is not appropriate to put this note through the whole IVOA standardization process. However, the Technical Coordination Group is in the process of drawing up a procedure for “strong notes”, which will be made available to the community in an official RFC process and will carry a weight somewhere between the current notes and the IVOA recommendations. We plan to apply this procedure to the STS note.

We also discussed the VOEvent Transport Protocol document which I circulated a couple of weeks ago: <http://www.ivoa.net/pipermail/voevent/2014-May/002959.html>. Although the consensus continues to be that moving this towards IVOA standardization is the ultimate goal, Mike had a number of suggestions pertaining to the most recent draft. We agreed, therefore, to open it up to another round of discussion on this mailing list. Hence, I’d like to reiterate my call in the message linked above for comments, with the same caveat regarding the scope of this document. In the interests of keeping up forward momentum, and since I’m personally anticipating a busy summer, I’d really appreciate comments on this sooner rather than later.

The final document discussed was VOEventRegExt, the latest draft of which Matthew circulated to this list recently: <http://www.ivoa.net/pipermail/voevent/2014-May/002961.html>. This updated version of the previous draft addresses all the comments he had received, and we agreed that this document was now ready to progress to put forward for review as a proposed recommendation [2].

Given that both STS and RegExt are now quite mature, we also agreed to start taking steps towards putting them into practice. This involves coordinating with data providers who might wish to publish time-series data and data centres who might be willing to host it, as well as discussing with registry operators about publishing information about existing VOEvent streams and servers. Volunteers for taking on any of these tasks are welcome!

Thanks to all of those who took part in the discussion,

John

[1] That likely means version 2 of the Spectral Data Model: <http://www.ivoa.net/documents/SpectralDM>.
[2] Those who, like me, need a refresher on the IVOA document lifecycle might find <http://www.ivoa.net/documents/#process> useful.