Networking observers and observatories with remote telescope markup language

Abstract

Remote Telescope Markup Language (RTML) is an XML-based protocol for the transport of the high-level description of a set of observations to be carried out on a remote, robotic or service telescope. We describe how RTML is being used in a wide variety of contexts: the transport of service and robotic observing requests in the Hands-On Universe™, ACP, eSTAR, and MONET networks; how RTML is easily combined with other XML protocols for more localized control of telescopes; RTML as a secondary observation report format for the IVOA's VOEvent protocol; the input format for a general-purpose observation simulator; and the observatory-independent means for carrying out request transactions for the international Heterogeneous Telescope Network (HTN).

An RTML transport implementation on the Liverpool Telescope

“…added as an observation request onto the telescope queue). A further RTML message is constructed in response to this invocation (a 'confirm' or 'reject' message) and is returned by the procedure (as a String) to the invoking client (Hessman, Tuparev & Allan 2006).…”

“…The aim of the project was to create a HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) 1 based SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) 2 endpoint allowing RTML (Remote Telescope Markup Language) (Hessman, Tuparev & Allan 2006) transport to and from the Liverpool Telescope 3 written in Java using current Web-Services technologies. The requirements on the service included:…”