IVOA Executive Committee Meeting (TM21)

Tues Dec 5 2006 @ 15.00-16.30 GMT

Logistics

Telecon: Check email from Bob Hanisch 27 Nov 2006 - let him know how you will connect to the NASA telecon service by 30 Nov 2006.

Agenda (draft: ver 20061127)

1. Roll Call and Agenda
2. Minutes of FM20
3. Review of Actions
4. Approval of new IVOA Recommendation(s) [Standing Item]
5. Status of the IVOA assessment (FG/DDY)
6. WG/IG/Standardisation process: RW to report on
   • Recommendation process (Identifiers, Registry Metadata, UCD list)
   • Nominations for vice chairs
   • Evolution of the Apps IG
   • Term limits: list of WG chairs at and beyond a 3-year term
   • Status report on SSA, VOQL, EPO metadata
7. Status of the Assessment of Implementation of IVOA standards in Data Centres (DS/CA)
8. Status of the preparation of the Beijing Interoperability meeting (CC)
9. Future Interop meetings
10. Schedule of other IVOA-related events (all)
11. Data and Venue of the next Exec meeting (telecon?)
12. AOB
13. Summary of Actions

Reports from the Projects

ArVO

Recently the Armenian VO received a new office in Byurakan. There are 6 persons working for ArVO: Areg Mickaelian (PI), Tigran Magakian (Project scientist), Lida Erastova, Lusine Sargsyan, Lilit Hovhannisyan, and Parandzem Sinamyan. Two more students are involved in the project as well. ArVO continued its development on the collaboration between its team based in the Byurakan Astrophysical Observatory (BAO) and the Institute of Problems of Informatics and Automation (IPIA) of the Armenian National Academy of Sciences. The IPIA has a powerful Armcluster computer, where a number of large scientific projects are being carried out. The IPIA allocates software experts for joint work with the Byurakan team members (all are astronomers). A 1TB disk space has been allocated on the ArmCluster for ArVO's activities. This will be used for a number of large astronomical catalogs, and the tasks that will run on the Armcluster will be cross-correlations between large catalogs (including the DFBS spectroscopic database), theoretical calculations, and modeling.

The DFBS Roma web interface (DFBS portal) is almost finished. A.Mickaelian will visit Rome this December to finalize the tasks, and to start the low-dispersion spectra classification works. ArVO team member L.Sargsyan will have a 2 months stay in Rome for this work. It is planned that the users will have access to all 40,000,000 spectra and their suggested classification, which will allow to select objects of necessary types, make samples, study definite fields, etc.

The Digitization works of the Byurakan archive plates are being continued. The digitized Byurakan plates will make up the main part of the Armenian astronomical data centre. The establishment and utilization of the Virtual Observatories standards in Armenia is being continued, too.

AstroGrid

China-VO

CVO

VObs.it (aka DRACO) Italy

Euro-VO

France VO

GAVO

HVO

Japan-VO

Korean VO

NVO

RVO

SVO

VO-India

Reports from WGs & IGs(follows order as at http://www.ivoa.net/forum/)

Data Access Layer WG

Data Models WG

Grid and Web Services Working Group

Registry WG

Semantics/UCD WG

Work is in progress on the first Ontology of astronomical object types. A TN has been issued the 31st of October 2006. Being a repository of astronomical knowledge, the Ontology is necessarily a collaborative effort of the whole scientific community collaborating within the IVOA. Contributions were asked, and an updated version of the TN will soon be released for further discussion (and contribution).

VOEvent

VOQL WG

The VOQL Technical Experts Group (VOQL-TEG) has celebrated two meetings so far. Outcomes from these two meetings will be fed to the community in the coming days.

Agenda, Minutes and discussions within these meetings can be seen at the VOQL-TEG mail archive (http://www.ivoa.net/forum/voql-teg/0611/date.htm)

The most significant outcome of the group so far is a clear separation of Language, Protocol and Service. The items the VOQL group will be dealing with are therefore:

1.- The Language.

This will be a refurbishing of the current ADQL able to accomodate different communities' needs. A document only dealing with the Language specification will be produced.

2.- The Protocol.

This will deal with how to access data using the ADQL language. A new document will be produced for this so called Table Access Protocol (TAP). The chair of the Data Access Layer group is a permanent member of the VOQL-TEG to co-author the initial creation of this protocol

3.- The Service.

This will deal with the important issue of Cross-match. A new document will be produced for a type of services dealing directly with cross-matching of sources (of whichever type). This work will be initiated within the VOQL-TEG and evolved in conjunction with other IVOA groups.

Expected deliveries:

1.- Refurbished ADQL doc in quite a mature state by China 2007 interop.

2.- First draft of the Table Access Protocol (TAP) doc by China 2007 interop.

Further discussions are needed to estimate possible due dates for crossmatch service specification.

VOTable WG

Applications IG

Astro-RG IG

Data Curation and Preservation IG

The projects are investigating representation (CASPAR) - how to characterize the structure and information content of digital documents, and management policies (PLANETS) - how to enforce preservation policies such as the number of replicas and migration to new technology. They are also constructing testbeds for the demonstration of preservation tools and services.

The related projects in the US include: - NARA Transcontinental Persistent Archive - NHPRC Persistent Archive Testbed - Library of Congress NDIIPP - Library of Congress DigArch - DSpace - Fedora

Each of these preservation projects is building upon data grid technology for the management of distributed shared collections. The goal is to differentiate between management of distributed data and application of preservation processes that generate the required archival form.

SDSC is collaborating on development of open source software with these projects based on iRODS (integrated Rule-Oriented Data System). The first release is scheduled in the next 1-2 weeks. This new technology is intended to automate the application of management policies across distributed shared collections.

The IVOA needs to specify the management policies that are required for image archives, for data products used in publications, and for the processes that generate the data products (mosaics, image cutouts, simulation output).

Theory IG

-- NicholasWalton - 27 Nov 2006