Introduction

voeventdb.server is a database-store and accompanying RESTful query API for archiving and retrieving VOEvent packets.

There is an accompanying Python client-library for end-users (i.e. astronomers), voeventdb.remote.

A what?

(If you’ve never heard of a VOEvent, you may want to read this first).

This package contains code for building a database of transient astronomical events, for which alerts or follow-up data have been sent via the VOEvent network. It also provides a RESTful API, which means you can query the database remotely via the internet, either using your web-browser or your programming language of choice.

This serves two main purposes:

  • It allows people distributing or monitoring VOEvent packets to ‘catch up’ with any missed data, in the event of a network or systems outage.
  • It allows astronomers to search through the archive of VOEvents. This can be useful for planning future observations, or looking for related events in a particular region of sky, or mapping the distribution of detected events, etc.

Key Features

The key features of voeventdb, as far as the end-user is concerned, can be summarised as follows:

  • Ready-made Python client-library
    If you’ve never used a ‘REST’ interface before, don’t worry. Voeventdb comes with a ready-made Python client-library, voeventdb.remote, which simplifies querying the database to calling a few Python functions, as laid out in the accompanying tutorial.
  • Full XML storage
    You can always retrieve the original packet-data if you know the IVORN identifier (and assuming there’s a copy in the database).
  • Spatial filtering
    You can limit your search query to a ‘cone’, i.e. only returning events near to a given location. This functionality is powered by Sergey Koposov’s q3c.
  • Web of citations
    The database contains the information needed to determine reference / citation links between different VOEvent packets, so for example you can check if an exciting new transient announced in one packet has already been followed up by another VOEvent broadcasting observatory.
  • Various summary statistics at your fingertips
    View the number of VOEvents broken down by observatory, by month, by type, etc.
  • Extensive filters, applicable throughout
    Narrow your query to a particular type of alert, limit it to packets authored between certain dates, only return events which are cited by others, return all events citing one particular packet, etc etc. Filters and endpoints can be thought of as orthogonal, i.e. the same filter-set can be applied to any endpoint.
  • Loading / dumping of XML packets in plain-old-tarballs
    The package contains routines for handling BZ2-compressed tarballs containing the original XML packets. This allows for version migration, or exporting the archive to another tool entirely. It also keeps the backups remarkably compact - all 750,000 or so packets for the past 12 months weigh in at just under 100MB in compressed form.

Getting started

If you just want to query our copy of the database rather than running your own, then you should probably head over to the Python-client-package, voeventdb.remote, or jump straight to the relevant documentation.

If you would like to access the REST API directly, our copy of voeventdb is hosted and documented at http://voeventdb.4pisky.org/. You can find reference information on how to form your http-queries here.

If you want to run a local copy of voeventdb, or contribute to voeventdb’s development, see Installation.