The US VAO Facility for Rapid Transients (if funded) will collect and disseminate observations about time-critical astronomical transients, and add annotations and intelligent machine-learning to those observations. The information can be “pushed” to subscribers, who may be either humans or machines that control telescopes. Subscribers can prepare precise “triggers” to decide which events should reach them and their machines, that may be based on the generic event, or on the specific vocabulary of parameters that define a particular type of observation. The system will not be centralized, but rather a set of interoperating nodes with caching. The twin thrusts are automation of process, and discrimination of interesting events

Djorgovski, S. G.

Donalek, C.

Drake, A. J.

Graham, M. J.

Mahabal, A.

Seaman, R.

Williams, R. D.

Caltech Authors - Main

Astronomical Data Analysis Software and Systems XIX
ASP Conference Series, Vol. 434, c© 2010
Y. Mizumoto, K.-I. Morita, and M. Ohishi, eds.
US VAO Facility for Rapid Transients
R. D. Williams, C. Donalek, S. G. Djorgovski, A. J. Drake,
M. J. Graham, and A. Mahabal
California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California
R. Seaman
NOAO, Tucson, Arizona
Abstract. The US VAO Facility for Rapid Transients (if funded) will collect
and disseminate observations about time-critical astronomical transients, and
add annotations and intelligent machine-learning to those observations. The
information can be “pushed” to subscribers, who may be either humans or ma-
chines that control telescopes. Subscribers can prepare precise “triggers” to
decide which events should reach them and their machines, that may be based
on the generic event, or on the specific vocabulary of parameters that define a
particular type of observation. The system will not be centralized, but rather
a set of interoperating nodes with caching. The twin thrusts are automation of
process, and discrimination of interesting events.
An important qualitative change is happening in astronomy. The ability to
survey large areas of the sky deeply and repeatedly, and to process the data in
real time, has opened a whole new field of research: time domain astronomy. The
sky is now studied as an ever-changing collection of dynamical phenomena, with
moving objects and objects that change in brightness, or appear in an explosive
manner. Many of these phenomena can be understood only through time-domain
studies, and often require a rapid follow-up using a variety of ground-based
telescopes.
Events are Universal: The ideas here apply not just to astronomy, but in
other areas of society where events must be followed by rapid, often expen-
sive actions. For example, earthquake early warning systems could shut down
elevators, computers, etc, in the seconds between detection and the time the
earthquake waves need to propagate. A geiger counter at a homeland security
installation scans cargo, and issues events, whose importance is compared with
warnings from other sources, and may trigger a manual inspection. A power or
data network must respond to reports from multiple sources to detect unusual
events, and bring in a human to evaluate. In all cases, it is good to keep the
data and those evaluations in a structured manner (portfolio).
This facility has been proposed as part of the Virtual Astronomical Obser-
vatory, a pending proposal with the US NSF and NASA. We see this “VORapid”
facility implementing several components. In each of the following, it is implicit
that there will be both a human-facing interface, and a machine-facing (service)
interface.
123
124 Williams et al.
The components are:
• A web-based broker, allowing subscription, with events delivered in near-
real time.
• A web-based publishing system, so that authenticated users can inject
events.
• An event repository, allowing bulk queries and drill-down.
• An interoperable event broker, conforming to IVOA standards for event
handling.
We will first build a prototype system that scales up to many different event
streams, and scales to large numbers of events, large numbers of event authors
(streams), and large numbers of event subscribers. The new system will work
well with amateur astronomers and students, as well as professional astronomers
scheduling follow-up on the big NSF-funded telescopes, operated by NOAO and
its partners, or on the emerging world-wide robotic telescope networks. Some
challenges for the facility will be:
Generality: Many new event streams are coming online or are planned for
the future. Thus, it is time to deploy a system that can work with events
in general, rather than a custom solution for each survey or spacecraft. The
system should encourage adoption of a standard framework and interoperability,
avoiding duplication of effort in implementing similar systems.
Subscription: From the web interface, subscribers can arrange to get event
packets immediately (“pushed”). Users will build an “alerts” consisting of a
trigger and an action. Whenever an event is injected, it is tested against the
trigger, and if it passes, then the action occurs. Actions can be messaging (email,
IM, robotic telescope), fetching from archives, or running a computation. One
objective of VORapid is to encourage robotic follow-up in near real time to
catch the most exciting, largely unknown, physics of rapid transients. Once such
observations are made, we will encourage submission of that data to VORapid
as events, which will be added to the web page for the original event, and of
course the follow-up event can be sent to subscribers and other event brokers.
Authoring: Authors of events build semantic content in advance, through
an event stream, with description of these events, and semantic definitions of
the parameters that will be used to describe each event of the stream. There
can also be a template-builder to define the Overview presentation of the event.
Streams can be private or public, with access roles according to owner, group,
and public. Authors can gain trust by injecting and removing test events in a
private stream.
Annotation: Each event will have a web-page, a portfolio of data: a collec-
tion including spectra, cutouts, etc, from many different surveys and observa-
tions. VORapid will integrate multi-sourced heterogeneous data, so long as the
event author builds the metadata (event stream) through the web-based author-
ing interface. The evidence is thus collected, for past evidence of variability, for
nearness to a galaxy, for excess infrared flux, and so on, that can help to classify
that source. The data will be available not only to human clickers, but also
through an Annotator API, which will be called in real time for data mining
when the event is injected to VORapid.
Sharing: VORapid will allow events to become part of conversations in
both traditional and new social media. One priority will be integration with
the Central Bureau for Astronomical Telegrams, the Minor Planet Center, As-
US VAO Facility for Rapid Transients 125
Figure 1. Here is the concept of Portfolio. This example portfolio from
Nov 9, 2009, shows several events: (1) the original observations from the
CRTS survey (top gray bar), (2) a robotic follow-up observation from the
New Mexico Skies observatory 18 minutes later, (3) a human assessment of the
meaning of the portfolio, and (4) a collection of archival results. A Portfolio
can also contain events from data mining modules, a sort of a computational
follow-up, where complex data is reduced to a simple quantity. Here (5) four
images are analyzed for motion.
tronomers Telegram, etc. Other media, such as Twitter, Facebook, Second Life,
Google Wave, etc, should be used as places for humans and machines to see and
comment on events.
Intelligence: Just as an annotator component can get archival images for
the event portfolio, so it can analyze data objects already present, for example
comparing FITS images to detect motion of a source, or reduction of a spectrum
to a single number of interest. These high-level criteria can then be used to
trigger action, as with any other parameter in the portfolio.
Finding Events and Streams: We will use the international distributed Reg-
istry of the Virtual Observatory to enable publishing and discovery of event
streams, so that all interested parties can subscribe to future events and browse
past events from that stream. When a new event stream or service is created,
its detailed metadata will be written and recorded by the author in a standard
way.
Privacy: There should be a detailed access policy, so that people can confi-
dently use VORapid in the early stages of a project, when events are for a small
group only. Another way to handle this would be to install the (open-source)
VORapid software on an internal network.
Rapid Follow-up: Real-time follow-up observations are crucial to a full un-
derstanding of the science of transients. These authors are already collaborating
126 Williams et al.
Figure 2. VORapid will have several types of display and outreach. Above
left is a display of recent events, with click-through to detailed portfolio.
Below left is the full sky with recent events, shown with Microsoft Worldwide
Telescope. WWT can show many image surveys, and access NED, Simbad,
and other catalog resources. At right are the Twitter and Facebook streams,
with detections automatically broadcast from the reduction pipeline, and also
the human-built interpretation several hours later.
with event providers, building new collaborations with providers of events, with
the amateur astronomy community, and with owners of robotic telescopes.
International Interoperability: VORapid will be part of an emerging inter-
national infrastructure of astronomical transients using the VOEvent protocol
(Seaman et. al. 2005). There are now many streams and many follow-up facil-
ities, and a general agreement to use the “VOEvent” protocol for representing
and communicating astronomical transients.
Acknowledgments. This work was supported in part by the NSF grant
STCI-0915473 and by Microsoft Research.
References
Seaman, R., et. al, 2005, VOEvent: Sky Event Reporting Metadata
http://www.ivoa.net/Documents/latest/VOEvent.html


English

US VAO Facility for Rapid Transients

Astronomical Data Analysis Software and Systems XIX
ASP Conference Series, Vol. 434, c© 2010
Y. Mizumoto, K.-I. Morita, and M. Ohishi, eds.
US VAO Facility for Rapid Transients
R. D. Williams, C. Donalek, S. G. Djorgovski, A. J. Drake,
M. J. Graham, and A. Mahabal
California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California
R. Seaman
NOAO, Tucson, Arizona
Abstract. The US VAO Facility for Rapid Transients (if funded) will collect
and disseminate observations about time-critical astronomical transients, and
add annotations and intelligent machine-learning to those observations. The
information can be “pushed” to subscribers, who may be either humans or ma-
chines that control telescopes. Subscribers can prepare precise “triggers” to
decide which events should reach them and their machines, that may be based
on the generic event, or on the speciﬁc vocabulary of parameters that deﬁne a
particular type of observation. The system will not be centralized, but rather
a set of interoperating nodes with caching. The twin thrusts are automation of
process, and discrimination of interesting events.
An important qualitative change is happening in astronomy. The ability to
survey large areas of the sky deeply and repeatedly, and to process the data in
real time, has opened a whole new ﬁeld of research: time domain astronomy. The
sky is now studied as an ever-changing collection of dynamical phenomena, with
moving objects and objects that change in brightness, or appear in an explosive
manner. Many of these phenomena can be understood only through time-domain
studies, and often require a rapid follow-up using a variety of ground-based
telescopes.
Events are Universal: The ideas here apply not just to astronomy, but in
other areas of society where events must be followed by rapid, often expen-
sive actions. For example, earthquake early warning systems could shut down
elevators, computers, etc, in the seconds between detection and the time the
earthquake waves need to propagate. A geiger counter at a homeland security
installation scans cargo, and issues events, whose importance is compared with
warnings from other sources, and may trigger a manual inspection. A power or
data network must respond to reports from multiple sources to detect unusual
events, and bring in a human to evaluate. In all cases, it is good to keep the
data and those evaluations in a structured manner (portfolio).
This facility has been proposed as part of the Virtual Astronomical Obser-
vatory, a pending proposal with the US NSF and NASA. We see this “VORapid”
facility implementing several components. In each of the following, it is implicit
that there will be both a human-facing interface, and a machine-facing (service)
interface.
123
124 Williams et al.
The components are:
• A web-based broker, allowing subscription, with events delivered in near-
real time.
• A web-based publishing system, so that authenticated users can inject
events.
• An event repository, allowing bulk queries and drill-down.
• An interoperable event broker, conforming to IVOA standards for event
handling.
We will ﬁrst build a prototype system that scales up to many diﬀerent event
streams, and scales to large numbers of events, large numbers of event authors
(streams), and large numbers of event subscribers. The new system will work
well with amateur astronomers and students, as well as professional astronomers
scheduling follow-up on the big NSF-funded telescopes, operated by NOAO and
its partners, or on the emerging world-wide robotic telescope networks. Some
challenges for the facility will be:
Generality: Many new event streams are coming online or are planned for
the future. Thus, it is time to deploy a system that can work with events
in general, rather than a custom solution for each survey or spacecraft. The
system should encourage adoption of a standard framework and interoperability,
avoiding duplication of eﬀort in implementing similar systems.
Subscription: From the web interface, subscribers can arrange to get event
packets immediately (“pushed”). Users will build an “alerts” consisting of a
trigger and an action. Whenever an event is injected, it is tested against the
trigger, and if it passes, then the action occurs. Actions can be messaging (email,
IM, robotic telescope), fetching from archives, or running a computation. One
objective of VORapid is to encourage robotic follow-up in near real time to
catch the most exciting, largely unknown, physics of rapid transients. Once such
observations are made, we will encourage submission of that data to VORapid
as events, which will be added to the web page for the original event, and of
course the follow-up event can be sent to subscribers and other event brokers.
Authoring: Authors of events build semantic content in advance, through
an event stream, with description of these events, and semantic deﬁnitions of
the parameters that will be used to describe each event of the stream. There
can also be a template-builder to deﬁne the Overview presentation of the event.
Streams can be private or public, with access roles according to owner, group,
and public. Authors can gain trust by injecting and removing test events in a
private stream.
Annotation: Each event will have a web-page, a portfolio of data: a collec-
tion including spectra, cutouts, etc, from many diﬀerent surveys and observa-
tions. VORapid will integrate multi-sourced heterogeneous data, so long as the
event author builds the metadata (event stream) through the web-based author-
ing interface. The evidence is thus collected, for past evidence of variability, for
nearness to a galaxy, for excess infrared ﬂux, and so on, that can help to classify
that source. The data will be available not only to human clickers, but also
through an Annotator API, which will be called in real time for data mining
when the event is injected to VORapid.
Sharing: VORapid will allow events to become part of conversations in
both traditional and new social media. One priority will be integration with
the Central Bureau for Astronomical Telegrams, the Minor Planet Center, As-
US VAO Facility for Rapid Transients 125
Figure 1. Here is the concept of Portfolio. This example portfolio from
Nov 9, 2009, shows several events: (1) the original observations from the
CRTS survey (top gray bar), (2) a robotic follow-up observation from the
New Mexico Skies observatory 18 minutes later, (3) a human assessment of the
meaning of the portfolio, and (4) a collection of archival results. A Portfolio
can also contain events from data mining modules, a sort of a computational
follow-up, where complex data is reduced to a simple quantity. Here (5) four
images are analyzed for motion.
tronomers Telegram, etc. Other media, such as Twitter, Facebook, Second Life,
Google Wave, etc, should be used as places for humans and machines to see and
comment on events.
Intelligence: Just as an annotator component can get archival images for
the event portfolio, so it can analyze data objects already present, for example
comparing FITS images to detect motion of a source, or reduction of a spectrum
to a single number of interest. These high-level criteria can then be used to
trigger action, as with any other parameter in the portfolio.
Finding Events and Streams: We will use the international distributed Reg-
istry of the Virtual Observatory to enable publishing and discovery of event
streams, so that all interested parties can subscribe to future events and browse
past events from that stream. When a new event stream or service is created,
its detailed metadata will be written and recorded by the author in a standard
way.
Privacy: There should be a detailed access policy, so that people can conﬁ-
dently use VORapid in the early stages of a project, when events are for a small
group only. Another way to handle this would be to install the (open-source)
VORapid software on an internal network.
Rapid Follow-up: Real-time follow-up observations are crucial to a full un-
derstanding of the science of transients. These authors are already collaborating
126 Williams et al.
Figure 2. VORapid will have several types of display and outreach. Above
left is a display of recent events, with click-through to detailed portfolio.
Below left is the full sky with recent events, shown with Microsoft Worldwide
Telescope. WWT can show many image surveys, and access NED, Simbad,
and other catalog resources. At right are the Twitter and Facebook streams,
with detections automatically broadcast from the reduction pipeline, and also
the human-built interpretation several hours later.
with event providers, building new collaborations with providers of events, with
the amateur astronomy community, and with owners of robotic telescopes.
International Interoperability: VORapid will be part of an emerging inter-
national infrastructure of astronomical transients using the VOEvent protocol
(Seaman et. al. 2005). There are now many streams and many follow-up facil-
ities, and a general agreement to use the “VOEvent” protocol for representing
and communicating astronomical transients.
Acknowledgments. This work was supported in part by the NSF grant
STCI-0915473 and by Microsoft Research.
References
Seaman, R., et. al, 2005, VOEvent: Sky Event Reporting Metadata
http://www.ivoa.net/Documents/latest/VOEvent.html


https://authors.library.caltech.edu/23757/1/Williams2010p13933Astonomical_Data_Analysis_Software_And_Systems_Xix.pdf

US VAO Facility for Rapid Transients

Abstract

Similar works

Full text

Available Versions

Caltech Authors - Main

Caltech Authors - Main