IVOA Executive Committee Meeting (TM35)

*Tues Mar 2 2010 @ 16.00 GMT

Logistics

Telecon:

Agenda

1. Roll Call and Agenda (MA)
2. Minutes of FM34 Suppl., Minutes of FM34 (FP)
3. Review of Actions (MA)
4. Project Reports - Significant Events Only
5. TCG status (CA)
6. Approval of new IVOA Recommendation(s) [Standing Item]
7. Expired/expiring Chairs (all)
8. Program Organising Committee (SG)
9. Standing Committee on Science Priorities (DDY)
10. Proposal for IG on Data Mining (KDD-IG) (FP)
11. ObsTAP project (DS)
12. Educational aspects - regional experiences (all)
13. Inclusion of new data in the VO - national strategies (all)
14. Mailing lists (FP)
15. Future Interops (DS/MO)
16. AOB
17. Date of Next Exec Meeting
18. Review of New Action Items (MA)

Reports from the Projects

ArVO

AstroGrid

The AstroGrid project formally finished on Dec 31st 2009, but the AstroGrid consortium continues with a mixed bag of funding. AstroGrid services (eg the Registry) are being maintained, and the AstroGrid software is available to data centres and other VO projects through http://deployer.astrogrid.org . A new version of VODesktop (V1.3.2) was released on Feb 10th (see http://www.astrogrid.org). The main change is the ability to use TAP services through the Query Builder in VO Desktop. We look forward to more TAP services becoming available ! For the time being, some AstroGrid staff are still on VO-related funding (eg AIDA or VAMDC), some have moved onto data centre posts which have a partial VO responsibility, and some have moved on to completely different posts.

Australia-VO

BraVO

China-VO

CVO

Euro-VO

The first meeting of the (mostly) renewed Euro-VO Science Advisory Committee (SAC) took place on Dec. 14, 2009, at ESO. The SAC is composed of leading European researchers outside mainstream VO projects (see http://www.euro-vo.org/pub/fc/sac.html). SAC members were briefed on recent Euro-VO activities and provided scientific input to the project. The next SAC meeting will be at Imperial College in June.

The second European “hands-on” VO School was held at CDS, Strasbourg, Jan. 25 - 28, 2010 as part of the activities of the Euro-VO AIDA project (see http://cds.u-strasbg.fr/aidahandson2010/). The aim of the school, targeted mostly at PhD students and young post-docs, was to expose European astronomers to the many available VO tools and services so that they could be used efficiently for research purposes. The school involved 39 students, out of the 79 who requested to participate, and 13 tutors and tool developers. Based on the input received from the participants during the hands-on and feedback sessions, and gathered from the feedback form, the school was a great success.

Euro-VO also continues to hold bi-yearly Technology Forums, gathering in particular the partners' technical teams. Like at the IVOA level, science requirements and feedback and feedback from implementation appear more and more explicitely in these meetings, and in particular during the last meeting in Trieste a significant part of the informal meeting ('Hack-a-thon') was devoted to discuss SED building and ObsTAP. The successful Educational and outreach activities led by VObs.It with active participation of several other partners also continues.

France VO

(this report covers the last year of activities since no report was posted since TM31, February 2009)

The Action Spécifique Observatoires Virtuels France (ASOV, which is the F-VO has continued to support travel of staff from the French VO teams to the IVOA Interoperability meetings, and for co-operation meetings between different teams inside the country. One can note the emergence of a 'Grand Sud Ouest' collaboration, with meetings gathering teams from Toulouse, Tarbes, Bordeaux and Montpellier to share their expertise on the implementation of VO standards. Also, a first local 'VO day' for scientists was successfully organised in Bordeaux (24 September 2009, http://www.france-ov.org/twiki/bin/view/ASOVFrance/JourneeOVLAB2009 - in French) by CDS staff. A meeting of presentation of the VO, including technical aspects of implementation, was also held in Nice for the Observatoire de la Côte d'Azur. The ASOV status, with emphasis on research tools developed in the framework of VO R&D activities, was presented as usual in a plenary session of the French astronomical society, which was held this year in Besançon (29 June - 4 July).

The annual meeting of ASOV was held 28-29 October 2009 in Paris (http://www.france-ov.org/twiki/bin/view/ASOVFrance/Reunion2009), gathering ~40 participants from all over France. The VO work and implementations were presented, as well as status report of some of the work on interoperability standards, and examples of science requirements and science usage.

Several Working Groups continued to work on specific topics, in particular Planetary Sciences and geodetics. A meeting was also organised in collaboartion with the French 'Institut des Grilles' to support people who want to up-take the computational grid environment.

French astronomy organizes a national strategic exercise every 4-5 years, which are named from the city were the final colloquium is held. The creation of ASOV was a recommendation of the 2003 exercise (La Colle sur Loup), and ASOV was confirmed by the 2009 exercise (La Londe Les Maures). Its role remains to organize the French VO activities, to support take-up by data centers, and a strong emphasis is put on the support to take-up by astronomers. It is also proposed (but this is not confirmed at this stage) that ASOV could be given a role in the evaluation of services, together with the Nation Programmes which cover the different topics. The emergence of European-funded projects in domains such as planetary sciences EuroPlaNet), solar and heliopheric studies (HELIO), Atomic and molecular physics (VAMDC, with activities dealing with usage in astrophysics), was also noted. All these projects have a strong French participation and, in some cases, French leadership. It is worth reminding here that ASOV is a 'light' programme which mainly distribute traval money and organises meetings. It is consulted on all topics relevant to the VO.

The 2010 Announcement of Opportunities is on-going. It is open to proposals for travel money for participation in IVOA meetings (or similar meetings for other disciplines), co-operation meetings, regional meetings, and support to take-up by scientists.

The level of participation of French teams in IVOA meeting has continued to be high. The May 2009 Interoperability meeting was organised in Strasbourg. The "Community Feedback VO School 2010" focussed on PhD students and post-docs, organised by the EuroVO-AIDA project in January 2010, was also held in Strasbourg, and a national school is planned in view of the success and very positive effects in labs (several French participants held successful mini-VO workshops in their institutions after the School).

Active participation in the technical work on IVOA standards, in education and outreach activities coordinated by VObs.it in the framework of EuroVO-AIDA, and support to the 'VO days' organised elsewhere in Europe, continue.

GAVO

HVO

Japan-VO

The Japan VO team held a tutorial to promote the VO portal and several VO tools, such as Aladin, VOPlot, VOSpec, TOPCAT, and others. Because this tutorial was the first one after we had started the JVO official operation, we did not expect to have many applicants. However, we received about twenty applicants, exceeding our capacity.

Korean VO

NVO

The US VO project remains stalled as we await NSF funding. There has been some progress, however, in recent weeks, and it would seem that release of funds is imminent. Of course, we have had this impression a number of times in the past.

In the interim we are proceeding, using NASA funds already in hand, to maintain our core services and run regular testing of aliveness and compliance of VO services. We are also going ahead and convening the VAO Science Council, the group that will advise us on science priorities. The Council will meet at NASA Goddard on March 26-27. We are preparing presentations describing possible development activities in seven areas: 1) a cross-matched "master catalog" and advance cross-matching tools for users, 2) support for rapid transients, 3) much more extensive linking between data and publications, 4) robust data discovery and data mining, 5) a extended set of VO-enabled tools, including visualization, 6) integration of theoretical simulations and simulated observations, and 7) development of a "seamless" astronomical research environment.

The members of the Science Council are drawn from the US astronomical community and represent a variety of types of organizations and research interests. Several members have long-term connections to the VO, but most are from outside the VO project and we hope will bring a fresh perspective.

Pepi Fabbiano, chair, SAO
Daniela Calzetti, U.Mass.
Chris Carilli, NRAO
Zeljko Ivezic, U. Wash.
Eric Feigelson, Penn State
Paul Eskridge, Minn.State
Sarah Seager, MIT
Alyssa Goodman, Harvard
George Djorgovski, Caltech
Marc Postman, STScI
Barry Madore, Carnegie

RVO

SVO

Manpower: 10 FTEs. The SVO Thematic Network (people from Spanish institutes with interest in the VO) is composed of 112 members in 28 institutes.

Standards: Work on access protocols and models for theoretical data is progressing. Information on this topic can be found at: http://svo.cab.inta-csic.es/modules.php?op=modload&name=phpWiki&file=index&pagename=Projects-Theory

VO archives: - Technical support for the development of a VO archive for a robotic telescope (in collab. with the University of Barcelona)

VO Science:

- "GTC/OSIRIS Spectroscopic Identification of a Faint L Subdwarf in the UKIRT Infrared Deep Sky Survey". (Lodieu et al. 2010ApJ...708L.107L)

- Scientific support to the discovery of hot subdwarfs using VO tools.

Outreach:

- "The Virtual Observatory for the amateur astronomy". Pro-Am workshop. Cordoba, Nov 2009. José M. Alacid, Enrique Solano.

- Aladin: Translation into Spanish (in the framework of EuroVO-AIDA)

- Use cases: Translation into Spanish (in the framework of EuroVO-AIDA)

Education:

- Euro-VO AIDA School. Strasbourg. January 2010. Two SVO members in the Scientific and Technical Organizing Committee (STOC)

VObs.it

VO-India

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

Applications WG

Data Access Layer WG

Data Models WG

• Core Components Observation Data Model

The goal of this effort is to provide a consistent and concise description of the minimal set of metadata for observations necessary to perform data discovery. The targeted implementation platform is a TAP/ADQL service that should be manageable to be installed by most archive services without too much re-engineering cost. This effort has two collaborative aspects: a conceptual one, that should provide a logical and extensible model, and a pragmatic engineering aspect that focuses on a strategy for the integration of existing data collection, stored in existing DB. A draft document is currently being elaborated the first version of which is published at http://www.ivoa.net/internal/IVOA/ObsDMCoreComponents/WD-ObsCoreDM-0.1-2010Jan15.pdf.zip A first implementation is available from CADC and will be described in the IVOA Observation Core Components Data Model working draft.

• Full Observation, Provenance and Extended Characterisation Data Model

1. Uses-cases for complex data sets (CCD mosaics, polarised data ) XML description examples of polarized or composed observations (F. Bonnarel, A.Richards)
2. Examples for resolution variation and variable PSF in observations by Igor Chilingarian and F.Bonnarel
3. Collaboration on Provenance data model started during Garching interop meeting (J.deSantander, A.Delgado, N.Delmotte, M.Louys, I.Chilingarian, Bonnarel)
4. A note on Polarization model and data access has been written by A.Richards with collaboration of F.Bonnarel.

• Characterisation data model in practice for in science applications

• Photometry Datamodel

Discussions are currently taking place (ESAC, SVO, CDS) for a bottom-up approach for the representation of SEDs .The Photometry DM presented in Garching and SSA/SpectrumDM are re-used.

• Utypes and Units

• Miscellaneous

Grid and Web Services Working Group

Registry WG

Semantics/UCD WG

VOEvent

VOQL WG

VOTable WG

Data Curation and Preservation IG

The DCP IG has basically been inactive for the past year, but DCP activities are now getting under way such that we can expect the IG to regroup. In the US, NSF's DataNet program has now funded two projects, DataOne and the Data Conservancy. The latter is lead by Johns Hopkins University and has a direct NVO/VAO connection.

Theory IG

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