Filtering

As the number of events on the VOEvent backbone increases, it is unlikely that individual subscribers will wish to receive or act upon all of them. Comet therefore implements an experimental filtering system which enables subscribers to express their preferences as to which events to receive.

At any time, the subscriber may send the broker an authentication response message. (Note that in the current implementation no authentication is actually requred, and the processing of digital signatures is not supported). Within the <Meta /> section of the authentication packet, one or more XPath expressions may be supplied in <Param /> elements with a name attribute equal to xpath-filter. For example, the following will select all VOEvent packets which are not marked as a test:

<trn:Transport version="1.0" role="authenticate"
  xmlns:trn="http://www.telescope-networks.org/xml/Transport/v1.1"
  xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
  xsi:schemaLocation="http://telescope-networks.org/schema/Transport/v1.1
    http://www.telescope-networks.org/schema/Transport-v1.1.xsd">
  <Origin>ivo://origin</Origin>
  <Response>ivo://response</Response>
  <TimeStamp>2012-02-08T21:13:53Z</TimeStamp>
  <Meta>
    <Param name"xpath-filter" value="/*[local-name()=&quot;VOEvent&quot; and @role!=&quot;test&quot;]" />
  </Meta>
</trn:Transport>

The broker will evaluate each filter against each VOEvent packet it processes, and only forward it to the subscriber if one (or more) of the filters returns a positive result.

It is worth noting that XPath expressions may return one of four different types of result: a boolean, a floating point number, a string, or a node-set. For the purposes of filtering, we regard a positive result as a boolean true, a non-zero number, a non-empty string, or a non-empty node-set.

When evaluating the XPath expression, no namespaces are defined. In other words, an expression such as //voe::VOEvent will not match anything (and hence the use of local-name() in the example above).

The filtering capabilities of XPath are quite extensive, and the user is encouraged to experiment. For example, the names and values of individual paramters within the VOEvent message can be checked:

//Param[@name="SC_Lat" and @value>600]

Or messages from particular senders selected:

//Who[AuthorIVORN="ivo://lofar.transients/"]

Note

Although Comet and current IVOA usage prefer the term “IVOID”, VOEvents themselves still use the older “IVORN” terminology.