France VO

(1) France-VO supported French participants to the several international meetings, from its own funds, in complement to funding by the laboratories, or by evaluating funding requests made in the frame of the French participation to the Euro-VO Data Centre Alliance project.

French teams very actively participated in the Beijing Interoperability meeting (18 French participants), with talks presented in particular in the Applications, Data Access Layer, Data Modeling, Semantics and VO Query Language WG sessions, and at the Theory IG meeting.

There was also an active French participation to the two Workshops organised by the Euro-VO Data Centre Alliance and Facility Centre. The 'Astronomical spectroscopy and the Virtual Observatory' Workshop (ESAC, 21-23 March 2007) was well attended by scientists interested in spectroscopy and French VO teams (22 participants from French laboratories), thanks in particular to the triggering activity of the France-VO Spectroscopy Working Group at the national level. In addition, several laboratories developing or willing to develop VO services were represented at the 'Euro-VO Workshop on how to publish data in the VO', and three sessions were organised by CDS staff.

(2) Meetings organised by the France-VO (AS OV) Working Groups since February 2007:

• Geodetics and Fundamental Astronomy Working Group: meeting on UCDs and STC, Paris Observatory, 19 February 2006 (meeting minutes, in French). Also note the poster presented at the IUGG 2007 conference in Perugia: 'GGOS and Virtual Observatory' (Berio, Coulot, Deleflie & Exertier).

• The Workflow Working Group held its 4th meeting on 26 April 2007 at the IAP in Paris (meeting Web page and meeting summary , in English).

• Theory Working Group: a Workshop was organised in Lyon on June 18-19, with participation from several teams preparing theory services to be published in the VO, and from Gerard Lemson, Chair of the IVOA Theory Working Group and of the Theory Expert Group of the EuroVO-DCA project. The meeting Web page (in English) can be found at http://www.france-vo.org/twiki/bin/view/GROUPEStravail/ObsVTheorie07jun18.

(3) Presentation to the general astronomy community

• Presentation of the VO project status and of services made available by the French VO teams at the annual meeting of the French astronomical society (pdf version, mostly in French).
• Staff from France-VO plan to participate in the JENAM 2007 meeting (Yerevan, August 2007) and in a Workshop organized by the Indian VO in October 2007.