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Will cover how the query builder, streaming system, and the light curve mining all work.
Lasair query builder uses very SQL-like syntax
Actions on query depend upon whether or not you are logged in and if it belongs to you or is public.
Checker confirms if the likely run-time will exceed limits
You can ask the Lasair team to promote your query to be public on he Lasair site
Email alert for the query is limited to one per 24 hours.
Soon we will provide annotation capability and if liked can be enabled to allow annotations to be pushed back into Lasair.
Mining light curves system constituent parts will all run on the same cloud.
Julien Q - how do you avoid a SQL injection through the web interface? (Julien Q in Zoom chat : “what about SQL code injection? any internal LIMIT to avoid running full data retrieval? I’m always afraid to put a query builder public and unsupervised …”)
Roy answer - suggests Julien try and hack and report back. Also there is a validation system that checks for keywords.
DaveY also answers - DB is also read-only
Roy anwser in Zoom chat - “There is a LIMIT 1000 added to all queries, and an execution timeout.”
Jakob Q - will you be able to make queries based on other people's annotations?
Roy answer - yes, but there will be delay.
Jakob Q - Is there an internal log system on when queries were run?
Roy answer - currently tracking all queries being run but not sure what to do with that information.
Web interface (Andy Lawrence)
(need slides - messaged him)
Lasair philosphy is to keep it simple. Focus on functionality rather than appearance.
Beginning to define final user interface for start of operations.
Keen to hear comments and guidance from participants.
Functionality
canned queries – e.g., cone search
query builder – custom queries
documentation - user guidance examples on website and a cook book on LSST:UK wiki
helpdesk - email (also GitHub [tickets], though not for regular users)
Embedded image viewer/ interactive plotter for visualising rich information that is available.
Open questions
Is navigation and user flow obvious?
Should we provide general information for public?
Should we have more sophisticated documentation?
Should we aim for more-interactive web pages, forms, etc.?
Sara Q in Zoom chat “I wonder whether some of the information for non-scientists/ interactive stuff could be put together in one of the LSST proposals to the current call”. At NAM there are keen amateurs using Lasair and so UI improvements might be helpful
Meg - the call is only 30K USD, ~ 3mths of post-doc)
Roy helps establish a collaboration
Meg - should you be focussing on Lasair ZTF or is the goal Rubin Lasair? Would the call be better spent elsewhere?
Jacob likes how Lasair information is organised, on a single webpage, very easy to find and scan.
Eric answer - for own science often go to Lasair initially since it is convenient.
George noted “For documentation, I wondered if we could follow a Rubin lead? We should find out what kinds of documentation Rubin will provide. By mirroring their style and tools we can provide something seamless and familiar.”
Eric answer - More documentation is good. Rubin has dedicated team for this.
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(need slides)
Lasair team has introduced REST APIs using Django Rest Framework (looks to be defacto standard)
See http://lasair-iris.roe.ac.uk/api for initial notes from Roy
Effectively, these are machine-readable versions of functions provided (interactive) on webpages
/api/cone -
/api/query
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Python wrapper “lasair” (available via PIP install) to help use API.
Plan to add support for querying Cassandra directly
Also have Jupyter Notebook examples, hosted on Google Colab
Need user account on Lasair to access
Ken provided live demo of cone-search notebook.
1720 Tools interface (Andy Lawrence)
1730: Discussion
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