Speaker
Description
Solar event data lives across many services: for example, HEK features,
CCMC DONKI flares and CMEs, FlareScoreboard prediction models, RHESSI
flare lists, and WSA coronal-hole and magnetic-connectivity forecasts —
each built for its own purpose, with its own format, positional
descriptors, cadence, and update behavior. To simplify the management and
display of these datasets on the same Sun in helioviewer.org, we needed
all of them accessible in the same form. Normalizing data from each
source comes with its own technical challenges. This includes varying
descriptions of identity, shape, and coordinates, not just format:
tracking predictions across reissues when records carry no stable
identifier; representing event boundaries that are a single polygon in
one source and many contours in another; and reconciling different
coordinate frames (Stonyhurst, Carrington, helioprojective) into
positions on the observed Sun. We present events-api, the Helioviewer
Project's open-source answer: a service that collects each source on a
schedule, normalizes everything into one event model with multi-polygon
boundaries, rotates positions to the requested observation time, and
serves it all through one REST API. helioviewer.org's event capabilities
now uses events-api, and the corresponding @helioviewer/event-tree React
component lets any React application embed the same events with a few
lines of code. The result is a uniform, queryable event history across
feature/event sources — one place to ask what happened on the Sun, and
what was predicted.