IVOA Executive Committee Meeting (TM31)

Thursday Feb 19 2009 @ 18.00-19.30 GMT

Logistics

Telecon:

Agenda

1. Roll Call and Agenda -­ NW
2. Minutes of FM 30 and FM 30S
3. IVOA Deputy Chair - FP
4. Project Reports ­- Significant Events Only
5. Review of Action Items ­ NW
6. Approval of New IVOA Recommendations ­ Standing Item
7. Report by committees - DDY
   • Newsletter
   • Liaison Group
   • Take-up Group
8. TCG status - CA
9. Prospective New Members – Update – FP
10. Spring Interop Status Report – FG
11. Fall Interop Status Report – PP
12. Venue of Spring 2010 Interop
13. Date of Next Exec Meeting
14. Proposal for new Data Mining IG
15. AOB
16. Review of New Action Items

Reports from the Projects

ArVO

AstroGrid

During October-January we released minor updates of VODesktop, Topcat, and AstroGrid Python. All these tools are being well used. Over two thousand copies of VODesktop have been downloaded since the main release in April. As described in October, AstroGrid will formally close as a development project later this year; however the AstroGrid consortium will keep the main tools, services, and software components maintained and running indefinitely, regardless of the success or otherwise of VOTC:UK.

Slow but definite progress has been made planning the post-AstroGrid future. A "Statement of Interest" to create VOTC:UK was submitted in November by 39 co-Is representing 30 facilities, missions and data centres. It would combine a VO Technology "core team" with effort by already funded facilities and missions (i.e. VISTA, Herschel, XMM, etc). Rather than agreeing on a single grand public face, we would share data management infrastructure (e.g. Registry, VOSpace, API, service configuration tools), and encourage each mission etc to build its own UI, tools etc focused on its own needs and user community. VOTC:UK is seen as a component of a Europe-wide VOTC, and we welcome international collaboration on the data management infrastructure. (Use of IVOA standards is guaranteed !)

The proposal is under review by a sequence of STFC committees, which of course is slow, making it hard to maintain a continuity between AstroGrid and VOTC:UK.

Australia-VO

China-VO

CVO

Euro-VO

The EuroVO-DCA Coordination Action of the Sixth Framework Programme has been closed on 31 December 2008, after 28 months of successful activities, in particular the organisation of Workshops (two Data Centre Workshops, organised at ESA and ESO respectively, a community feedback workshop on Spectroscopy and VO, and two companion Euro-VO Theory and Grid Workshops), the production of a Census of European Data Centres, of a medium-term strategy document for the data centre alliance, of a document on the "Framework for inclusion of Theory data and services in the VO", which reports in particular on the work accomplished on theory-related standards, sucessfull activities for coordination with the computational Grid, and intense activity in support of data centres in other European countries.

The final documents of the project (census, medium term strategy and framework for theory) will be made available after the final project review.

The EuroVO-AIDA project is continuing its activities. Among the highlights:

• Activities in support to users include in particular a Workshop "Multiwavelength astronomy and the VO", which was held at ESAC on 1-3 December 2008, and a "Hands-on Workshop" which will be held at ESO 30 March - 2 April 2009.
• The third Euro-VO Technology Forum will be held in Strasbourg 16-19 March. It will be a forum for discussion on EuroVO-AIDA technology-oriented activities: Interoperability standards, led by AstroGrid; Data Access Protocols and Data Models, led by ESA; and Assessment of new technologies, led by CDS (which includes Web 2.0 for data centres - CDS -, semantics - INAF - and data mining - Univ. of Edinburgh). The very active Outreach activities (led by INAF) will also be presented.
• The ESAVO Registry has now become the EURO-VO Registry
• The next AIDA Workshop on How to publish data in the VO will be organised at ESAC on 22-26 June.

The EuroVO-VOTECH project has been given a six month extension. We are producing some final reports and working towards defining a persisting VO Technology Centre (VOTC).

France VO

The Action Spécifique Observatoirs Virtuels France (ASOV, which is the F-VO) held it annual meeting in Paris 12-13 November 2008, followed by a day devoted to splinter meetings on 'software bricks for the VO', Workflows, and Planetary Sciences. The meeting has as usual ilusstrated the different strands of work in France: Working groups on specific topics (e.g. Theory, which has been working in close collaboration with the relevant activity of EuroVO-DCA; Planetary sciences, which is now strongly linked to the Europlanet project; Workflow; Grid), VO implementation by laboratories, technical work on VO standards and support to implementation (SAMP, registry).

Active participation in Euro-VO projects (EuroVO-DCA, EuroVO-AIDA, VO-TECH), has continued, with other European projects emerging as powerful drivers for national activities in planetary studies (Europlanet), solar physics (HELIO). The FP7-I3 VAMDC project (15 legal partners, 21 teams from 6 EU countries, 3 ICPC and USA as external partners), currently under negociation with the EU, aims at building an e-infrastructure for the exchange of atomic and molecular data. It is coordinated by ML Dubernet (LPMAA, UPMC) who has been supported by F-VO for many years. VAMDC will interact with the wider development of the underlying infrastructures, thus EGEE and the Euro-VO, and also participate in relevant standardisation activities such as the International Virtual Observatory Alliance, to ensure continued interoperability of VAMDC resources with related e-Infrastructures.

An EGEE tutorial has been organised in Meudon on 10-12 December 2008, with ASOV support. A Workflow workshop was held in Paris on 14 January 2009, and a meeting of the Geodesy and Fundamental Astronomy Working Group on 5 December 2008 in Paris.

French VO teams continue to participate actively in the development of the IVOA standards, with significant participation in the Baltimore Interoperability meeting. CDS will organise the next Interoperability meeting in Strasbourg (24-29 May 2009).

GAVO

HVO

Japan-VO

Korean VO

NVO

RVO

SVO

VObs.it

VO-India

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

Applications WG

The SAMP document has been through RFC. The major issue that came up in the review was how the vocabulary of messages was to be disseminated and maintained. Interests were ease of access, a definitive location for the standard vocabulary, and the ability to easily publish new messages of both general and specialized interest. The agreed solution was to modify the existing Twiki pages, making them accessible through a simpler and more permanent URL, http://ivoa.net/samp. The alias has been set up and a document noting this, and with other small editorial changes has been placed in the document repository (V1.11) and we are now ready for final approval through the TCG. This should begin immediately. This process should start immediately.

Data Access Layer WG

Data Models WG

Grid and Web Services Working Group

Registry WG

Semantics/UCD WG

VOEvent

The Hotwired II workshop will be held at UC Santa Cruz from 26-30 April (http://www.cacr.caltech.edu/hotwired2). Registration is open. Agenda should resemble Hotwired I (can click through from links page). The working group will also use the workshop to focus its efforts on VOEvent v2.0 and related work such as vocabularies and defining VOEventStreams for the registry. We've started a wiki page to collect these discussions (http://www.ivoa.net/cgi-bin/twiki/bin/view/IVOA/VOEventTwoPointZero). -- RobSeaman - 17 Feb 2009

VOQL WG

VOTable WG

Astro-RG IG

Data Curation and Preservation IG

Theory IG

Standards & Processes

The RFC on the updated IVOA Documents standard (V1.1) brought numerous comments, and the document was reversed to Working Draft. The new version (V1.2), is posted for two weeks and a new formal RFC will be open at the beginning of March.

In particular, the Documents standard has been merged with the IVOA Note "Guidelines and Procedures for IVOA Document Standards Management V1.0", and the document numbering schema has been updated, after a lively discussion within the TCG. Following the new numbering schema, the current WD is called WD-DocStd-1.2-20090114.html.

<-- 

 

 

 Set ALLOWTOPICRENAME = TWikiAdminGroup
 
 
-->

<-- 

 

 

 Set ALLOWTOPICRENAME = TWikiAdminGroup
 
 
-->