IVOA VOEvent
Working Group Chair:
Rob Seaman
Vice Chair:
Alasdair Allan
Chair Emeritus:
Roy Williams
GETTING STARTED
Pending the release of the VOEvent working group's book, "Hot-wiring the Transient Universe" (see next bullet), projects and individuals wanting to get started with publishing or subscribing to streams of celestial transient events should consider visiting
SkyAlert or
DC3 Dakota for VOEvent-aware web services and component-level tools and brokers.
VOEvent Book
Members of the VOEvent community will be publishing a book,
"Hot-wiring the Transient Universe". The initial list of authoring assignments was created at
Hotwired II, but we are eager to find additional volunteers for this important task.
SPIE Astronomical Instrumentation 2010
Several sessions at the
2010 SPIE meeting in San Diego will focus on time domain issues in both the Observatory Operations and Software conferences.
Eventful Universe
The NOAO 50th anniversary symposium
Eventful Universe was held in Tucson 17-20 March 2010, touching on many topics key to the VOEvent working group and with many WG members in attendance.
VOEvent 2.0
A wiki page is set up for those who are interested in the evolution
of the VOEvent standard (Feb 2009). Click for the
VOEvent 2.0 wiki.
Hotwiring the Transient Universe II
The
VOEvent Workshop was held from 26-30 April 2009 at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Thanks to all who participated for making this the most successful VOEvent workshop yet!
VOEvent is an IVOA Standard
Latest VOEvent Recommendation
VOEventStream: Metadata for Collections of Events
VOEventStream-0.2.html
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
- IAU Symposium, "New Horizons in Time Domain Astronomy" - Oxford, UK, Sep 19-23, 2011
- ADASS time domain tutorial (proposed) - Boston, MA, Nov 7, 2010
- VAO All-hands meeting - Charlottesville, VA, Sep 30 - Oct 1, 2010
- LSST All-hands meeting - Tucson, AZ, August 9-13, 2010
Past Events
- SPIE Astronomical Telescopes & Instrumentation - San Diego, CA, June 27 - July 2, 2010
- IVOA InterOp - Victoria, BC, Canada, May 17-21, 2010
- Eventful Universe - Tucson, AZ, March 17-20, 2010
- 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 
SEAP-v0.1.doc 
noao_posters.tar