Amending the alert schema for PLAsTiCC simulations

Science Data Q&A
#1

tl;dr: is there a well defined process for amending the current LSST alert schema or creating alerts with a user-defined schema?

As part of the PLAsTiCC v2.0 broker challenge, we’d like to supplement the standard alert schema with host information. I’ve generated a notebook to add additional fields, but wanted to know the best practice for writing out these schema.

Using schema = lsst.alert.packet.Schema.from_file(path/to/our/modified/schema/lsst.v4_1.alert.avsc)
seems to throw up exceptions that it is still expecting a valid v4_0 defined schema.
Note that the modified schema are here: plasticc_alerts/Examples/plasticc_schema at main · LSSTDESC/plasticc_alerts · GitHub (the same workbook contains our work).

#2

Hi @reneehlozek, it looks to me like some of the namespace lines in your 4.1 schemas still specify the 4.0 schema (e.g., here)–I would see if changing these to 4.1 would help.

I will mention/warn that we (@spencernelson) are considering some larger changes to alert_packet to make it simpler: any eventual proposal will show up at DM-28733.

#3

Setting aside the technical question: Rubin is not going to have these host quantities available in our alerts (because the information is unknown!)–does it set the wrong expectation for PLAsTiCC data consumers to include them?

#4

hi @ebellm thanks for the input and technical help, that definitely fixed it. I’m excited to see the proposal on changes too, so thanks for the heads up. I agree that this exhaustive list is beyond the scope of what Rubin can provide (a more sensible list would be host mags + errors + light profile moments + PSF), but this will hopefully be a jumping off point for discussions about the alerts and how folks will use ancillary data in classifications.

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