Updates

[John Swinbank]

Dear TDIG,

With apologies for the prolonged radio silence, there are a few upcoming matters which I want to draw to your attention.

1. Hotwiring the Transient Universe IV

The next Hotwired meeting will take place in Santa Barbara, CA in May. I personally found the previous meeting extremely valuable, both as an opportunity to touch base with the VOEvent crowd, but also to meet and understand the problems faced by other members of the time domain community who are perhaps less active around these parts. I urge you to fit it into your agenda if you can.

Registration deadline is 1 March; details at http://lcogt.net/hotwired-iv-welcome.

2. Documents in preparation

We have previously indicated that both VOEventRegExt and VOEvent Transport Protocol are both “nearly ready” to be put forwards as proposed recommendations. However, there’s been little progress that I’m aware of since last May. In particular:

- Markus made some detailed suggestions on the most recent RegExt WD (http://mail.ivoa.net/pipermail/voevent/2014-May/002972.html). Matthew, as lead author, agreed that they looked reasonable but indicated that some might need more consideration. Matthew, has that discussion taken place? Is there anything we can do to get things moving?

- Mike provided some comments on VTP (http://mail.ivoa.net/pipermail/voevent/2014-May/002969.html), and indicated he’d follow up on the working draft, but I’ve not seen that follow-up. Mike, is that still on your todo list, or do you feel your comments in that mail were sufficient?

As a minimum, we should aim to have both these documents ready by the next InterOp (in Sesto/Sexton in June); even better would be to have them in good shape for Hotwired IV.

3. LSST involvement

My recent silence has been because I’ve been shifting continent and wavelength, and am now working for LSST Data Management at Princeton. Although my primary role within LSST is not related to transients, I’ve been asked to act as an interface between LSST and the VOEvent effort.

In recent discussions, LSST has reiterated its commitment to issuing VOEvent format alerts, with the caveat that there remain concerns over applicability of the current VOEvent standard and associated transport mechanisms to LSST’s requirements. How we handle this will obviously evolve over the next decade, but I look forward to discussing it with all of you!

Cheers,

John