Glossary
========

.. glossary::

    event
      The detection of a particle by a VHE instrument, including measurements
      (reconstructions) of its arrival time, direction-of-origin on the sky, and
      energy.

    event-list
      A table of information about detected particles (events), with one row per
      detection, and columns describing their parameters. This may include other
      relevant instrument-dependent event parameters such as particle class or
      background probability.

    IACT
      Short for "Imaging Atmospheric Cherenkov Telescope"

    IRF
      Short for "Instrument Response Function". The set of IRFs allows to transform the measurements in detector units/coordinates to astrophysical quantities with physical units/coordinates

    observation
      From a conceptual standpoint, an observation is the act of recording data
      with a telescope, including relevant data processing. For VODF Level-1,
      it is also the minimal set of data that a user can fetch to perform a
      science analysis.

    reconstruction
      For VHE data, reconstruction is the act of estimating physical parameters of the detected particle (photon, neutrino, cosmic ray) from lower-level instrumental parameters.  For example, for an IACT, one might reconstruct a gamma ray photon's energy from the Cherenkov light intensity and geometric parameters of the detected air-shower.

    PR
      Short for "Pull Request"

    SOI
      Short for "Stable Observation Interval". It is a time interval during
      which the IRFs are considered as stable, within systematics.

    VHE
      Very-High-Energy, i.e. pertaining to particles roughly in the energy range
      of a few GeV to hundreds of TeV.

    WCD
      Short for "Water Cherenkov Detector"