The Open mulTiwavelength Transient Event Repository (OTTER)
We present an initial release of the Open mulTiwavelength Transient Event Repository (OTTER), a publicly available catalog of published transient event metadata and photometry. For this initial release, we focus on ingesting data related to tidal disruption events, a transient event that occurs when a star is torn apart by a massive black hole. Unlike previous efforts, our data schema is optimized for the storage of multiwavelength photometric datasets spanning the entire electromagnetic spectrum, from radio to X-rays. The dataset is stored using a document database structure to maximize flexibility while maintaining a level of data standardization. A web application provides an easy way to view the existing data and upload new datasets. A RESTful API, and related Python package, are available for bulk programmatic access of the data. We built this infrastructure with the goal of adding other transient data (SNe, SLSN, GRBs, etc.) and transient spectroscopy in the future. We plan to use this database infrastructure for a number of future projects including population studies of various transient events, machine learning with Rubin datasets, and light curve modeling. A beta release of the dataset, web application, and API was recently made publicly available (available upon request) and a publication is in preparation.