Progress Report on the Japanese Virtual Observatory

                              January 29, 2004
                              Masatoshi Ohishi (NAOJ)

1. Personnel

  Naoki Yasuda left NAOJ to the University of Tokyo.  He left 
also from the JVO project. Therefore, we seached for his 
successor and have found a very active person. We expect that 
he joins in the JVO project from coming March on.

2. Implementation of the JVO protorype 2

  We designed our prototype 2 since October 2003, adopting
OGSA. Our prototype has the three-tiered model (user client --
portal/controllers -- DB servers / analysis servers).
We spent almost three months for designing phase, and implementation
started in January this year. 
  We adopted several IVOA standards for the implementation; e.g.,
registry has the structure defined by the IVOA, and is stored
in an XML database manager.  Most of compoments were described
by the Java language. Our Query parser was written by the Java 
Compiler Compiler (JCC) to enable us to modify the parser
easier in the future.
 Our test scinario is to search for gravitational lenses created (?)
by the Cosmic strings. We used three observational databases: 
SXDS (Subaru XMM Deep Survey) and SDF (Subaru Deep Survey) 
observed by the Subaru telescope, and 2MASS.
 The prototype has just started to run (!) on January 25th, and
we found that it runs much faster than our previous prototype
which used the GRAM in many steps. This is because our prototype 2
uses the GRAM as minimum as possible.

3. Collaboration with other institutes in Japan

 ISAS (Institute of Space and Aeronautical Sciences) has launched
many satellites operating in the Infrared or X-ray regions, and
it has maintained several database servsers corresponding to these
satellites. Because there are is an exclusive communication line
between the ISAS and NAOJ (1 Gbps), and ISAS has shown much interest
to join the JVO project. We have started to discuss how we can
collaborate to involve observed data taken by the ISAS and NAOJ.
 Our project has been conducted under collaboration with those
people who have much interest on the Grid technology. Those people
told us that they wanted to know the standarization effort within 
the IVOA.