The VAO Transient Facility

TL;DR

The VAO Transient Facility aims to be a leading service for collecting, disseminating, and annotating astronomical transient events, supporting machine learning and scalability for next-generation sky surveys.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive brokering service for astronomical transients, emphasizing scalability, quality-of-service, and integration of machine learning for the community.

Findings

Design considerations for scalability and reliability

Review of existing tools and technologies

Planned capabilities for next-generation surveys

Abstract

The time domain community wants robust and reliable tools to enable production of and subscription to community-endorsed event notification packets (VOEvent). The VAO Transient Facility (VTF) is being designed to be the premier brokering service for the community, both collecting and disseminating observations about time-critical astronomical transients but also supporting annotations and the application of intelligent machine-learning to those observations. This distinguishes two types of activity associated with the facility: core infrastructure and user services. In this paper, we will review the prior art in both areas and describe the planned capabilities of the VTF. In particular, we will focus on scalability and quality-of-service issues required by the next generation of sky surveys, such as LSST and SKA.