[TASS] notes from RTML meeting in Berkeley, CA, Dec 3, 1999

[Stupendous Man <richmond@A188-L009.RIT.EDU>]

    On Dec 3, 1999, I attended a meeting on RTML (Robotic Telescope
Markup Language), held in Berkeley, CA.  RTML is the creation
of Shawn Gordon at Lawrence Berkeley Labs.  It's a language
which allows humans to specify one or more observations for
a telescope to carry out by itself.

    I took a set of notes during the meeting.  They are not
"official" by any means -- I paid more attention to items of
interest to me, personally.  I didn't manage to get the names
of all the attendees right -- my apologies.

    Peter McCullough, who participated by telephone for most
of the morning, sent me some notes he took, which helped
me fix up a number of mistakes.  Thanks, Peter!

    You can find a copy of my notes in plain ASCII text at

        http://stupendous.rit.edu/richmond/hou/rtml_dec99.rev

Beware -- the file is about 964 lines long, and 35 KBytes.

     John Mattox, another of the workshop participants, has added
some links and made some corrections.  He tells me that his version
is at
        http://gamma.bu.edu/atn/standards/RTML_meeting99.html

but I haven't looked there myself yet.

     There's a description of RTML itself at

        http://www.elite.net/~jcaymon/rtml/

     My two-line summary: RTML will do the job -- it will let us tell
the telescope what to do, and allow the telescope to respond.  I figure
that several people will write translators which turn their own
local telescope-control language to and from RTML.  Fine.

                                              Michael Richmond