IVOA VOEvent
Working Group lead:
Rob Seaman
Chair Emeritus:
Roy Williams
HTN Call For Proposals
The
Heterogeneous Networks Consortium announces a
Call For Proposals
for an observing project utilising four science-grade networked robotic telescopes.
CFP CLOSES JULY 25, 2008
VOEvent is an IVOA Standard
Latest VOEvent Recommendation
Charter
The objective of the VOEvent effort is to define the content and meaning of a standard information packet for representing, transmitting, archiving, and publishing a discovery of an immediate event in the sky. We will call this packet VOEvent. The objective is to drive robotic telescopes, to drive archive searches, to alert the community, and to build interoperable archives. The effort will include not just "photon" events, but also gravitational waves, neutrinos, air showers, etc.
Structured data is the target here, rather than natural language, so that automated systems can be most effective in interpreting VOEvent packets. The packet would contain "Who, When, Where, What, How" of the event. The "How" section would be instrument metadata, which would be an included schema specific to each instrument, and the "What" section would define event types, that would also be an included schema, because every project would have differne types of events.
VOEvent packets will gain persistent identifiers and be persistently stored in databases and registries. VOEvent packets could therefore reference other packets in various ways. The intention is that subscribers could get immediate notification of events, based on previously defined criteria. The standard does not define a transport layer or the construction of registries, clients, etc. However, the intended usage of the VOEvent packet would, for example, require packets to be small, and to be processed quickly, and would allow humans or machines to get very fast notification. The standard does not cover policy issues such as who can publish, who can build a registry of events, who can subscribe to a particular registry, nor the intellectual property issues.
One of the challenges of VOEvent is building a controlled vocabulary for describing astrophysical objects and processes, and the instruments that measure them. See the
VO Vocabularies Working Draft for details.
Mailing-list
- General working-group discussion archive.
Future Events
- Fourth VOEvent Workshop, Southern California?, Spring 2009
- ADASS XVIII Tutorial and/or BOF, Quebec City, Canada, November 2-5, 2008
- IVOA InterOp - VOEvent session(s), Baltimore, MD, October 27-31, 2008
Past Events
- SPIE AT&I, especially Obs. Ops. session 4, Orlando, May 24 - 31, 2006
- VOEvent session at the IVOA Interoperability Meeting in Madrid, October 6 - 7, 2005
- VOEvent session at the IVOA Interoperability Meeting in Kyoto, May 16-20, 2005
Links
Gamma-ray Burst Coordinate Network (GCN)
Astronomer's Telegram
RTML - Remote Telescope Markup Language and
Twiki here
Real Time Virtual Observatory
Space-Time Coordinate Metadata for the Virtual Observatory (STC)
Schema for IAU Telegram Discovery Report
Unified Content Descriptors, and
more here
Resource Metdata for the Virtual Observatory
Pairitel Project
eSTAR Project
AAVSO
Sourceforge Repository
Code development related to VOEvent is centrally hosted on the
Sourceforge VOEvent Project Page.
If you wish developer (write) access to the CVS repository to contribute to the existing code base, or you wish to become a project developer and host your own code, please mail
AlasdairAllan for details.
Discussion leading up to the VOEvent Recommendation
VOEvent-0.1.htm 
VOEvent-0.90.pdf 
typical.xml 
VOEvent-v0.9.xsd 
ADASS2007_VOEventBoF_Auden.ppt