If you have any questions or suggestions, or would like to attend, please contact Catherine Boisson and Christoph Deil.
- Face-to-face meeting
- Start: 11 am on Wednesday, April 6, 2016
- End: noon on Friday, April 8, 2016
- Pre-meeting planning telcon:
- Purpose: plan the f2f meeting
- March 29, 2016 at 6 pm CEST
- Agenda and notes at pre-meeting-telcon.md.
- Post-meeting follow-up telcon:
- Purpose: short reports on action items and activities after the meeting; keep people in contact.
- Date / time: tbd (will be scheduled at the f2f meeting)
- Agenda and notes at post-meeting-telcon.md.
Observatoire de Paris, site de Meudon, Place J. Janssen, 92190 - Meudon
The meeting will be held in the conference room, downstairs of Builging 9, the "big dom". See the access map
Practical informations: A list of a few convenient hotels in Paris can be found here The selected hotels are close to Gare Montparnasse serving Meudon SNCF train Meudon and Bellevue stations or close to RER C stop (regional line) serving Meudon Val Fleury RER station.
There are also a few options to book a room in Meudon within walking distance via airbnb.
From the train stations in Meudon, the Observatory is about 20 minutes walk uphill, whatever the station. From the SNCF station "Bellevue" (in Meudon) to the Observatory you may catch the 9:20 am bus, TIM, going up to the Observatory. Your next chance is one hour later...
Taxi in Meudon "Central taxis", 24h/24h, 7d/7d : 0146309012 or 0673385301
There will be no possibility of remote participation for this meeting.
Apologies if you would have liked to join the discussion but can't come!
We have the experience that audio or video remote participation is usually distracting and slowing down the face-to-face discussion.
Note that all presentation slides will be openly available in this repository and we also plan to write minutes for the discussion sessions, to provide a good basis for future online collaboration or meetings on the topic.
This two-day face-to-face meeting will bring together people from existing IACTs (imaging atmospheric Cherenkov telescopes) such as H.E.S.S., VERITAS, MAGIC, ASTRI, FACT, ... as well as the next-generation Cherenkov telescope array (CTA) interested in data level 3 (DL3).
The "Cherenkov Telescope Array Data Management" proceeding from ICRC 2015 explains what DL3 is:
... high-level observatory products comprised of selected gamma-like events, instrument response tables, and housekeeping data (DL3). DL3 data will have a total volume of about 2% of the DL0 data volume and guaranteed access will be provided in the CTA archive to basic users (e.g. Guest Observers and Archive Users).
Very roughly DL3 is what most users will download and analyse with science tools, similar to how Fermi-LAT data is distributed.
Most of the existing IACTs have started efforts to export their event data and instrument response functions (IRFs) at the DL3 level to FITS formats and there are some open-source science tools able to analyse it.
But so far no DL3 data model and data format specifications have been produced, making collaboration difficult!
There are some efforts to write documents within CTA. For the effort on IRFs see the "The Instrument Response Function Format for the Cherenkov Telescope Array" proceeding from ICRC 2015. In fall 2015 a few people from H.E.S.S. started writing down an open spec of the formats they use at gamma-astro-data-formats. These formats are (mostly, except for recent extensions) supported by Gammapy and Gammalib/ctools and are similar to the ones used by VERITAS.
The main goal of this meeting is to work on the DL3 data model and data formats.
- Start with summary presentations on DL3 in the various IACTs and codes that produce or consume DL3 data and IRFs.
- Gather use cases and see which ones are possible / not possible with the existing formats.
- Extend existing formats or create new ones that cover more (all?) use cases.
- Write down open specs (so that they are visible by all, not just CTA members, e.g. at gamma-astro-data-formats) that can form the basis for prototyping for the next months for data producers (mainly existing IACTs and simulated CTA data) and consumers (mainly science tool codes).
Finding a good data model and format and getting community adoption will be an ongoing task for the coming years. This meeting is just an attempt to speed up the process. The goal is not to "produce and decide on final formats".
Start: 11 am
(You can come any time after 9 am to work at the meeting place or have informal discussions, but the official program will start at 11 am.)
We'll start the meeting with a series of presentations to kick off the meeting.
- Catherine Boisson - Welcome, logistics
- Flash introductions. Everyone please say within ~ 1 minute who you are, what you're working on and what you'd like to work on and achieve at this meeting.
Overview presentations:
- Jürgen Knödlseder - DL3 for high-energy telescopes - experience from space missions (e.g. Fermi, INTEGRAL)
- Catherine Boisson - IACT data to end users
- Mathieu Servillat - VO data diffusion for IACTs
- Christoph Deil - Open data model and format specifications for gamma-ray astronomy (links: open-gamma-ray-astro mailing list, open-gamma-ray-astro Github org and gamma-astro-data-format spec)
- Tarek Hassan - Proposed DL3 IRF format and prototype code (flexIRF)
Experience and status reports from existing IACTs:
- Gernot Maier - DL3 in VERITAS
- Giovanna Pedaletti - DL3 in MAGIC
- Daniela Dorner and Kai Brügge - DL3 in FACT
- Saverio Lombardi - DL3 IRF concept and implementation status in the framework of the ASTRI MINI-ARRAY pipeline
- Christoph Deil - DL3 in HESS
Experience and status from existing open-source codes:
Then some general thoughts on DL3:
- Jaime Rosado and José Luis Contreras - DL3 data model beyond the IACT community?
- Jürgen Knödlseder - Thoughts on DL3 for IACTs
This concludes the presentations, the rest of the f2f meeting is very informal.
- Open plenary discussion (1 hour?) to discuss the goals for this meeting and the coming months / years.
- Plan parallel work in sub-groups for Thursday
- Identify topics for working groups
- How much time to allocate for each?
- Everyone puts their name to what they are most interested in.
- We put a schedule that tries to mininize conflicts of interest.
Dinner together at ??? at restaurant ???
Start: 9 am
9 am - 12:30 pm - Parallel work in sub-groups.
Sub-groups:
- TODO: list topics, rooms, times. (Link to notes.)
12:30 - 2 pm - Lunch break
2 pm - 5 pm - Parallel work in sub-groups
Sub-groups:
- TODO: list topics, rooms, times. (Link to notes.)
5 pm - 6 pm - Plenary session
- Summary reports from sub-groups
- Discussion
- Schedule sub-groups for Friday.
Dinner together at ??? at restaurant ???
Start: 9 am
9 am - 11 am: Parallel work in sub-groups.
Sub-groups:
- TODO: list topics, rooms, times. (Link to notes.)
11 am - 12:30 pm: plenary summmary session
- Brief summary reports from sub-groups.
- Identify action items: who does what after the meeting until when?
- Schedule the date / time for the post-meeting-telcon.md.
12:30 - Lunch
(alphabetical order by first name)
- Antonio Stammera
- Bruno Khelifi
- Catherine Boisson
- Christoph Deil
- Daniela Dorner
- Gernot Maier
- Giovanna Pedaletti
- Jaime Rosado
- José Luis Contreras
- Julien Lefaucheur
- Jürgen Knödlseder
- Kai Brügge
- Mathieu Servillat
- Régis Terrier
- Roland Walter
- Saverio Lombardi
- Tarek Hassan
The main work product from this meeting will be presentation slides presented on Wednesday, as well as notes and documents written collaboratively during the meeting.
We are using this Github repository to gather presentations and notes for this meeting: https://github.com/open-gamma-ray-astro/2016-04_IACT_DL3_Meeting
Please help us gather notes, especially summaries of the parallel sessions, and identified action items for the coming months (for us, and for people that couldn't come to the meeting).
To contribute, please make a Github account (it only takes a minute and is free) and make pull requests, adding files to the following folders:
- notes - Add notes as Markdown
.mdfiles. Use the notes/template.md file as a starting point if you like. - If you want to do collaborative note taking, a Google doc with URL shared via email or Twitter is a good option (and copy & paste the content over to this repo after).
- presentations - Add your presentation in PDF format if you want to present slides. Or just write down what you want to present in a Markdown file if you prefer.
If you have any questions, ask Christoph Deil or other participants that are familiar with Markdown and Github. If you don't want to use Github, just email files or notes to me and I'll add them to the repo.