Alasdair Allan
eSTAR Project
School of Physics
University of Exeter
Stocker Road
Exeter
EX4 4QL
Tel. +44-1392-264160
Email
aa@astro.ex.ac.uk
Web
http://www.astro.ex.ac.uk/people/aa/
- eSTAR: Building an Observational GRID
Allan A. et al., 2003, ADASS XII, Payne H.E., Jedrzejewski R.I., Hook R.N. (eds),
pp. 13, ASP Conf. Series 295, Astronomical Society of the Pacific, San. Fran.
- eSTAR: Telescopes and Databases as a Single Information Grid
Naylor T. et al., 2003, Towards an International Virtual Observatory,
Proceedings of the ESO Workshop held in Garching, Germany, 10-14 June 2002, in press
I presented a short talk about the
eSTAR project, and the implications of the technologies emerging from this work on Web and Grid Services, at the Interoperability Meeting at Cambridge in May.
eSTAR: Intelligent Agents and Web Services
The eSTAR Project is a programme to build a prototype robotic telescope
network. Intelligent Agent technology has proved to be a vital part of
this project, providing unified access to archive data, to telescopes
and to bibliographic data by carrying out resource discovery, data
mining and observing tasks. We discuss details of agent technology, and
outline why we believe that the main user of the proposed Grid will be
software agents rather than human astronomers. We also discuss the the
implications for web and grid services, with agents being both
consumers and providers of such services.
eSTAR: Intelligent Agents and Web Services (Power Point, 775k)
Cookie Daemon Sample Code (tarball, 8k)
eSTAR Testbed Catalogue Broker Service
The
eSTAR
testbed broker service has both a REST and SOAP interface, although the REST service is not yet complient with the NVO cone search specifications. The service will resolve a target name, if necessary, initallity using the CDS Sesame SOAP service, but falling back to use CDS SIMBAD if Sesame is unavailable.
It will then goes off and try to retrieve the cone search you specified on
whatever catalogue you specified, falling back to alternative sources to
retrieve the catalogue if its first choice of 3rd party service is
unavailable.
The returned catalogue is parsed and then output in the formatted as per
user specifications, currently supported formats are Cluster and JCMT
pointing, although I'm in the process of adding
VOTABLE support.
At that point any
Vizier and
SkyCat catalogue (and a few others), are
available via this service in VOTABLE format irrespective of the original
format that the 3rd party service returned.