Updates

[Rob Seaman]

John Swinbank <swinbank at transientskp.org> wrote:

> 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

Presentations, etc, from earlier meetings at:

	http://www.cacr.caltech.edu/hotwired3/

Proceedings for Hotwired III:

	http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2014htu..conf.....W

> 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. ...  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.

By all means!

> 3. LSST involvement
> 
> 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!

We have been discussing support for LSST since 2005 - one hopes another decade will suffice ;-)  The soul of VOEvent is expressed by Josh Bloom's slide from Shri Kulkarni's Transient Universe meeting in 2006:

	http://online.kitp.ucsb.edu/online/grbtu_c06/bloom/oh/21.html

The intent has always been to be adaptable to a very wide range of requirements.  The Hot-Wiring the Transient Universe series of meetings were organized as a forum for the systems engineering, robotic hardware, autonomous software, adaptive scheduling, etc, responsive to the diverse transient / variable star / moving object science use cases explored at TU-2006 and other time domain science meetings such as 2011's IAU Symposium 285, New Horizons in Time Domain Astronomy.

LSST participated in the first VOEvent workshop and various options for tabular constructs to efficiently describe the thousands of per-visit transients were discussed at that first meeting (likely in the first half hour).  In Santa Fe in 2013 we were still discussing similar options.  The main challenge is simply for LSST to focus on a single option within the current VOEvent paradigm.  Similarly, numerous options have been explored and implemented for alert transport options other than "vanilla TCP".  Since the entire point is to convey alerts to a wide range of community partners, it is critical to develop any new options of format or transport in consultation with the many time domain stakeholders in the international time domain community.  This is a perfect example of an appropriate role for the proposed IAU Commission on Time Domain Astronomy:

	http://timedomaincommission.org

The VOEvent Working Group and its successor Time Domain Interest Group have always been especially well intertwined in the IVOA with groups external to the IVOA - for instance, with robotic telescope projects such as the Heterogenous Telescope Networks WG.  This commonality of purpose should continue.

The program for Hotwired IV will be coming together over the next month or so.  The VOEvent / TDIG BoF at Hotwired III was quite successful, and it seems reasonable to hold another BoF in Santa Barbara to discuss the issues that John has mentioned as well as others.

Rob