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IVOA Executive Committee Meeting (TM52)Telecon 12 Feb 2014Contents LogisticsTelecon: 12Feb2014 @11am EST Here's a pointer to a world clock to translate the time for your location:http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?msg=IVOA+Exec+Telecon&iso=20140212T11&p1=43&ah=2 Agenda
Reports from the ProjectsArgentina - NOVAArVOAstroGrid | ||||||||
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< < | As for the last few meetings, UK VO (ex-AstroGrid) activity is now performed under the Euro-VO umbrella, or through data centre activities. However, as mentioned last time we are now running a project called ASTROTROP which is aimed at re-purposing VO software for Tropical Forest monitoring. We held a very successful first conference in October in Edinburgh. We would welcome involvement by any other VO projects | |||||||
> > | As for the last few meetings, UK VO (ex-AstroGrid) activity is now performed under the Euro-VO umbrella, or through data centre activities. However, as mentioned last time we are now running a project called ASTROTROP which is aimed at re-purposing VO software for Tropical Forest monitoring. We held a very successful first conference in October in Edinburgh. We would welcome involvement by any other VO projects | |||||||
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Australia-VOBRAVOChina-VO
ChiVOCVOEuro-VOThe current Euro-VO project, CoSADIE, is continuing to coordinate European VO activities. In particular, a Technology Forum gathering the teams which develop the VO will be held in Trieste, 12-13 March 2014 (http://www.cosadie.eu/twiki/bin/view/CoSADIE/TechForum3). CoSADIE will participate in a VO school organised in collaboration between Poland and France in Poland in June 2014. CoSADIE other strand of work is to assess all the elements necessary in a sustainable Euro-VO. This is done in close collaboration with the Astronet European project, which gathers the European funding agencies and establishes the strategy of astronomy in Europe. The new European Framework Programme, Horizon 2020, is explored to find how Euro-VO can look for support in the new context. Liaison with the Research Data Alliance and with other European projects such as EUDAT continues.ESAVOFrance VOThe annual meeting of the Action Spécifique Observatoires Virtuels France was held in Paris, 28-29 January 2014. The meeting programme and viewgraphs presented are at http://www.france-ov.org/twiki/bin/view/ASOVFrance/ProgrammeASOV2014 (mostly in French). The meeting gathered ~40 participants from Besançon, Grenoble, Nançay, Paris, Strasbourg, working on interoperability standards for astronomy, heliospheric and space plasma physics, planetary studies, and atomic and molecular physics (with also attendents working in the CTA project). Presentations dealt with the organisation of regional centres, standards, tools and services. The meeting demonstrated once again that the work on standards and tools performed in the IVOA context is reused and customized by other disciplines - taking advantage of the huge intellectual investment put by many in the IVOA. French teams continue to be very active in the development of standards in IVOA and in the other disciplines and in the organisation of the European/international Interoperability projects. Wrt. IVOA French teams are involved in the definition of most standards recently approved or in RFC (VOTable 1.3, PhotDM, VOUnits, PDL, MOC) and being worked at (DataLink, Simple Image Access, Spectral DM, Char2). France VO continues to support participation of staff working in French labs in IVOA meetings and in similar meetings organised in other disciplines.GAVOGAVO's Heidelberg and Potsdam data centers keep maintaining and developing services, e.g., a new imaging catalog of nearby AGNs in the infrared, and an improved publication of a catalog of candidate members of open clusters. We are also involved in working out the details of publishing upcoming data from Gaia. In standards, we continued preparation of the relational registry, which we see as a successor to the current interface for querying searchable registries. We also implemented a flexible prototype for datalink services, including provisions for slicing and dicing of large datasets, and started prototyping an improved method for dealing with Echelle spectra in the VO. Client support for this is provided by SPLAT, which also grew a premliminary interface to ObsCore and Datalink. We are active within the Edu IG, where we collaborate on writing a combined requirements/best practice Note and set up a subversion repository open to all IVOA members to develop and maintain educational material in; this includes recommendations on documenting the translation status.HVOVObs.itA national hands-on workshop on VO, with attached a session on Science gateways, took place in Catania in December (19th to 21st); workshop program, details and materials can be found here http://vobs.astro.it/vofriends/. VObs.it is starting to organize itself for the Spring 2015 Interoperability Meeting. Two locations are under evaluation: Sesto/Sexten (on the Dolomites) or Venice. Costs (both for organizers and participants) will vary greatly from one choice to the other, Venice being more expensive. If Sesto is chosen the meeting dates should be shifted to June and, since it's not easily reachable with standard means of transportation and is about 150 km from Venice, VObs.it can organize (no more than) two coaches to bring participants from Venice airport to the Interop location and back at the beginning and end of the meeting respectively. For participants not being able to take advantage of this service (or not attending the full meeting) a shuttle bus service exists (~50/60€ per person), or local transportation.Japan-VOUkraine VOVAO | ||||||||
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> > | The VAO team has been working concertedly on the top priority technical initiatives associated with the close-out phase of the project. Foremost among these is the Simple Image Access Protocol V2, which will provide support for discovery and access of n-dimensional data cubes. Although full international agreement on the details of the protocol and its associated data model is likely to go on beyond the termination of VAO, we are confident that we can deploy an initial suite of SIAP V2 services that will require only minor updates once full consensus is reached in the IVOA. We have also made significant progress in deploying desktop tools for astronomers and developers using Python. PyVO provides simple interfaces to all core VO protocols and thus allows for the development of custom VO-enabled Python programs. VOClient provides a higher level of abstraction for VO services and similarly allows users to develop custom scripts. SciDrive, our Dropbox-like cloud storage facility that is based on the VOSpace and VAO single sign-on authentication system, has been opened up for community use. Physical storage for SciDrive is provided by JHU. Agreement was reached with VO Italy, VO India, and SAO for the transfer of the IVOA document repository, web pages, wiki site, e-mail lists, and newsletter preparation. The transition process will be overseen by B. Berriman (IPAC). We continue to maintain the VAO web site, posting news items of interest to the community about VAO activities and other VO projects worldwide. The government shutdown in October led to service outages at GSFC/HEASARC, which impacted the VAO Data Discovery Tool and our routine monitoring services. Aside from this, reliability of VAO services has been very high. We continue to populate the VAO source code and document repository. We intend to have the repository complete in time for a formal project close-out review, scheduled for July 8-10 at Caltech. Subsequent to this review updates will be made to the repository as needed, prior to handing off responsibility for its maintenance to the NASA data centers. | |||||||
RVOSouth Africa VOSouth African Astroinformatics Alliance (SA3)The Southern African Large Telescope (SALT) Virtual Observatory Data Archive System (VODAS) is now available. SALT-VODAS allows users to search the SALT data archive for all publicly available SALT data. This includes data from commissioning proposals, included the High Resolution Spectrograph (HRS which is still being commissioned), all calibration data taken with SALT, and data from any proposal past its proprietary period. SALT-VODAs was developed in a collaboration between SAAO, SA3 and VO-India. Users can access VODAS from http://vodas.salt.ac.za/. This is first time data from any South African telescope has been made public. SA3 and CDS, with help from SA Centre for High Performance Computing (CHPC), has installed a mirror copy of VizieR, the CDS catalogue querying service, at the CHPC in Cape Town and is the process of testing it before making a public announcement. In addition to the primary site in France, VizieR mirrors are already functioning in Japan, Canada, India, UK, Russia, China and USA, but this is the first in the southern hemisphere. Patricia Whitelock February 2014 SVO(Since Sep 2013) Manpower: 8 FTEs. The SVO Thematic Network (people from Spanish institutes with interest in the VO) is composed of almost 200 participants from more than 30 labs. Science:
VO-IndiaOne of the main activities of VOI over recent months has been installation of the Catalina Realtime Transient Survey (CRTS) at IUCAA. Through a MoU signed with Caltech, IUCAA will be the sole server of the CRTS catalogues and images. The data has been transferred to IUCAA, the databases have been created and are being populated. The user interface is ready. The data will be released to the public before the end of February.Another project VOI is working on is preparing a set of Lite versions of VOI products, and other tools, for Android platforms. This was motivated by the large scale distribution of Akash (meaning Sky) Android tablets to high school and other students in India. This low cost tablet is meant to provide access to useful tools and services to students. VOI has been provided a number of these tablets to carry out the development. An early release is expected by mid-March. |