A Python API for OTTER

The Open mulTiwavelength Transient Event Repository (OTTER) is a new catalog of published transient data.Here we present a thick Python wrapper on the Representational State Transfer (REST) application programming interface (API) built-in to the OTTER backend database (the "OTTER API").Since the OTTER backend is built on the document database ArangoDB, using the REST API directly requires learning the Arango Query Language (AQL).Since AQL has a niche user base, OTTER users unfamiliar with it may face a roadblock to programmatic access of OTTER.To overcome this barrier, we created the OTTER Python API to make programmatic access easy and fast.In addition to wrapping the REST API, the OTTER Python API also provides additional methods for converting the stored photometry to standard units; helper methods for querying additional astronomy database services; and methods for quickly plotting the photometry stored in OTTER.