IVOA Exec Telecon TM18

January 18 2006 @ 17.00-18.00 GMT

Agenda (draft)

• Roll Call and Agenda
• Minutes of FM17
• Review of Actions
• Participation of Brazilian VO
• Preparation status of the spring IVOA Interoperability meeting in Canada
• IAU in Prague : status report
• IVOA demonstration stand during the IAU GA in Prague
• AOB
  • Summary of this meeting
  • Date and Venue of the next exec meeting
• Summary of Actions

Reports from the Projects

Euro-VO

China-VO

Since the last IVOA exec meeting, the China-VO obtained some progress in the following areas.

First, Chinese Virtual Observatory annual meeting for year 2005 (China-VO 2005) was held successfully at Shandong University at Weihai from November 25th to 27th. About 30 representatives from National Astronomical Observatories, Beijing Normal Univ., Central China Normal Univ., CNIC CAS, Tianjin Univ., Yunnan Univ. and Shandong Univ. at Weihai, attended the meeting. 20 talks were presented on all VO related fields, esp. on China-VO R&D. All related materials about the meeting including slides, pictures and other documents are available at: http://www.china-vo.org/cn/events/cvo05/. I am sorry the website was written in Chinese.

On the meeting, several highlights of the project ware demonstrated, including: JDL (Job Description Language) architecture and CompuCell interface/module, which will be the core of the China-VO testbed. Detailed design and Alpha version development have finished. A Beta version will be completed in the first half of the year.

VO_IMPAT, an imaging processing and analysis tool, which is an interactive imaging tool. The VO_IMPAT allows the users to visualize DSS image of any part of the sky and interactively access other catalogs provided by our data base system, i.e. BADC (Beijing Astronomical Data Center). Now, the functions of the VO_IMPAT are very limited, mainly copied from the CDS Aladin. In the future, its functions will be enhanced by adding many spectra analyze and data mining toolkits.

SkyMouse, an intelligent astronomical on-line service access client system. Several popular services, for example, SIMBAD name resolver, NED, ADS abstract service, are integrated. A screen word pickup client is also included in the system. In the summer of the year, a public version will be released to the public.

Preparation work for the IVOA 2007 Interoperability meeting has begun. Several documents required for funding application have completed and submitted to related authorities and organizations.

India-VO

Reports on recent developments at VO-I

The Virtual Observatory - India project has now entered a new funding phase (three years with possible extension for a fourth year), and I have the collaboration of Persistent Systems, as in the first phase of the project. In addition to the people from Persistent, I will have the support of two software people appointed on the project at IUCAA, and a post-doctoral fellow (physics-astronomy background) working full time on the project. there are also two full time MTech project students who have joined the project for six months.

We have recently released VOMegaplot, for dealing with a large number of points. Plotting millions of points, and holding on to information regrading each one of them, for later operations, has required a different approach from VOPlot, which involves creating a series of auxillary files for each catalogue. This has to be done just once, and the stored files can be sued in all subsequent studies of the catalogue. The package has limited features at the present, but we will add new ones as we go along, and comments from the community will be most useful. I would like to emphasis here that VOMegaplot is not a replacement for VOPlot.

We will continue to support VOPlot and VOPlot3D, and in fact are adding enhancements, and again suggestions are welcome.

We have released the source code for VOPlot.

We have released (I got the news this morning, 17th Jan, Indian time) a new streaming version of the C++ parser.

Our collaboration with CDS is continuing,a nd Francois Ochsenbien will be visiting us in February. We are also setting up new collaborations, and an interesting one will be with Caltech and Penn State regarding a new and improved version of VOStat, which will soon be ramped up. We are also discussing the possibility collaborating on the Quest survey data.

With JHU, we will be setting up on line morphological processing of galaxy images, and also take up related issues.

In India, we are entering the domain of grid computing in a collaboration with the Centre for Advanced Computing. I am also starting discussions for visualization of ecological data. It will be really interesting to extend our techniques to other fields.

These are exciting times, but we are still open for setting up projects, which can roll out over the months and years. So I welcome suggestions for working together, particularly on science driven projects.

There is a growing demand for organizing a VO workshop/school in India on the lines of the NVO schools, and I would like to start discussions for such an event to be organized in India in the last quarter of this year, and call upon IVOA friends to help with this venture.

Ajit Kembhavi

CVO

DRACO

F-VO

Japan-VO

(2) Funding proposals: The JSPS proposal that was submitted in September, 2005, to extend the Core-to-Core program for three years (2006-2009) was successfully accepted by the JSPS. It was announced that two or three proposals out of ten were accepted. This means that the Virtual Observatory activity in the world has been highy recognized in Japan.

(3) Development report: JVO designed Workflow Description Language based on BPEL4WS and implemented a part of the WF functionality in the JVO system. The WF is described in XML, and is converted into the Groovy script before execution. JVO plans to relaese this experimental operational system to limited users in Japan in the end of March 2006.

(4) VO as the core of Japanese Astronomical Data Center: It has long been discussed to reorganize NAOJ to enhance astronomical data management, and VO has been recognized to play the key roll. The discussion finished, and the NAOJ has decided to place the VO as a core of the new Data Center of the observatory. JVO team members will become members of the new Data Center. The new Data center starts from April 2006.

NVO

HVO

Korea-VO

RVO

AstroGrid

Recent highlights

• We have significantly improved the AstroGrid user interface, with a more consistent Workbench, and an integrated help system. Workbench versions of the Query Builder and Workflow Builder are under construction.
• Building on the success of the US Data Scope, we built a powerful new tool called Astro Scope which polls for all known data services in the Registry, presents the results in an interactive graphical form, with automated links to MySpace, Aladin, and Top Cat.
• We are planning a series of workshops and collaborative visits for (at different times) data centre staff, members of other VO projects, system administrators, tools writers, and astronomical end users. The first of these is taking place this week.
• We have begun a debate about the post-AstroGrid phase, from 2008 onwards

Australia-VO

SVO

GAVO

Armenia