VOEvent Update: JSON and data models

[John Swinbank]

Hi Roy, all,

Great to see activity in VOEvent land!

Unlike Tim, I don't have a Sunday afternoon to spend on this, so I have just a
few quick comments. In general, though, I found Tim's commentary thoughtful
and would commend it to your detailed consideration.

The first is that we should be careful with the title, and especially to the
message it sends to the non-IVOA-cognoscenti. Does "VOEvent Update" supersede
VOEvent 2.0? It certainly sounds newer and shinier, but it hasn't been
standardized and it's not what's currently floating about in the wild. I
wonder if something like "A Proposed Evolution of VOEvent" would be less
confusing?

Secondly, it would be great to see a little more motivation for the change. I
buy into the idea that JSON is the new hotness and XML is old and hard to
read, but only at a fairly superficial level. It would be more impressive to
demonstrate how this is actually addressing real limitations within VOEvent
2.0.

Finally, while schemata and data models are not my area of expertise, I worry
about the way this note (seems to?) gloss over the potential complexities of
XML-to-JSON translation. Should all JSON VOEvents be mappable back to an XML
VOEvent which follows the standard v2.0 schema? Do we need to do more homework
to make sure that's really the case? Should this be accompanied by a JSON
schema which is functionally equivalent to the XML one? Do we run the risk of
JSON-VOEvents which not only don't interoperate with their XML brethern, but,
don't even interoperate with themselves?

Cheers,

John




Roy Williams wrote on 2017-10-15:

> Dear Colleagues
> We respectfully submit an IVOA Note about some proposed improvements to the VOEvent standard. We would appreciate some discussion on this email address and at the upcoming meeting in Chile.
> Thank you for your attention
> Roy Williams, Scott Barthelmy, Eric Bellm, Matthew Graham, Rob Seaman
> 
> ==================
> 
> VOEvent Update: JSON and data models
> Author(s):
> Roy Williams, Scott Barthelmy, Eric Bellm, Matthew Graham, Rob Seaman
> 
> UTL:
> http://ivoa.net/documents/Notes/VOEventJSON/index.html
> 
> Abstract
> We propose an extension of the VOEvent format, to translate the packet from XML to JSON – with no semantic change. We also propose to use the VOEvent data model system to define three data-model Groups: “Light Curve”, “Associated Sources”, and “Followup Imaging”. This straightforward update of VOEvent simplifies the syntax and provides simple, standard representation of common astronomical datasets.
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