IVOA Roadmap for 2015B

This outlines the roadmap for development activities by the various IVOA working and interest groups in 2015/16 between the Sydney and Cape Town Interops.

Applications

HiPS - Hierarchical Progressive Survey

* "promote" HiPS IVOA note as a Working draft
* Study a new capability entry in the registry ?

VOTable 1.4

* still awaiting VODML serialization decision before starting a new cycle

JSAMP

* Support for https → try and see if a few standard adjustements will be required

Data Access Layer

• TAP-1.1
  • continue progressing the internal WD to full WD
  • connections to DALI-1.1, TAPRegExt-1.1, VOSI-1.1, ADQL-2.1 ongoing revisions

• TAPRegExt-1.1
  • WD ready since November 2015
  • Recommendation track will reflect the TAP-1.1 one
  • Registry WG effort

• ADQL-2.1
  • continue progressing the internal WD to full WD
  • ancillary wiki pages to promote DBMS back end support

• SimDAL-1.0
  • endorsement from Theory-IG
  • evaluate connections to DAL and Registry standards

• VTP-1.0
  • PR before end march 2016

• SIAV-2.0
  • Became a recommendation on december 23rd

• SODA-1.0
  • Working draft published on December 21st
  • Lively discussion on the DAL list
  • Request for implementations and prototypes by DAL WG Chair

• DALI-1.1
  • WD published on October 27th 2015

Data Model

ObsCore-1.1: New WD expected Jan. addressing final questions, should be PR ready. Targeting REC ready for Cape Town.

VODML-1.0: Stable WD expected Jan. with 3 model implementations (STC2, DatasetMetadata, NDCube). Should be PR ready in Feb. Targeting REC ready for Cape Town.

STC-2.0: Modeling efforts continue, mainly around vodml compliance. Will be focusing on getting Working Draft delivered for Feb 2016. The working group has been able to review the prototype model in DatasetMetadata, but the advent of an independent document may generate more feedback. Targeting PR ready by Cape Town.

DatasetMetadata-1.0: Model WD is stable, with minor vodml compliance items to be resolved early 2016. The path from there depends on the level of feedback on the STC2 working draft. Options include proceding to PR with embedded prototype STC2, or removing that section and going forward with reference to STC2 WD. In either event, there is a question about what constitutes an acceptable implementation of this model in particular. We will be addressing this question early in 2016 in order to meet the target of PR readiness for Cape Town.

NDCube-1.0: Similar to DatasetMetadata, this Working Draft has been fairly stable, with minor vodml compliance item to be resolved early in 2016. We expect some changes will be necessary as we work implementations between now and Cape Town. We have volunteers for producing examples, but may have trouble defining the serialization spec as these models fall between the 'old-style' and 'vo-dml' paradigms. Targeting PR ready for Cape Town.

Spectral-2.0: Passed RFC period, TCG review held pending DM Chair recommendation.

SourceDM-1.0: Status was presented in Sydney, sparking some good debate. Pre-WD efforts should continue, with update provided in Cape Town. At present, there is no targeted status for the Cape Town interop.

Grid and Web Sevices

• VOSI 1.1 - Implementation and Working Draft before the new year.
• UWS 1.1 to become a proposed recommendation in the next month.
• SSO 2.0 to become a proposed recommendation early 2016
• VOSpace 2.1 working draft at least one month before Cape Town.
• XML Schema Versioning Policy to become endorsed note before Cape Town.

Registry

Registering TAP tables (and other dataset-within-service-like things): While GloTS works wonderfully for TAP in TOPCAT, we will nevertheless publish a note on the auxiliary capabilities, as that will provide more uniformity in discovery as well as metadata richness. We will then try to convince the major TAP providers to include the new capabilities in their records. Client support is already there in TOPCAT. If takeup is sufficient, we would go for a WD with this by Cape Town.

Registry searchable by spatial constraints: We will continue to lay the software foundations in pgSphere (i.e., indexable MOCs). The existing footprintURL mechanism to distribute footprints will be good enough for prototyping.

Registry Interfaces: Work on version 1.1 (on harvesting and being a well-behaved registry, with the old client interfaces removed) will resume once the new RofR operators (CfA) have some experience in operating it so we can properly assess what RofR material should be in RI 1.1

Identifiers: Version 2 is in TCG review and should pass the Exec before the end of 2015.

DOI work: We will continue to talk with Datacite to evaluate requirements to keep/bring the datacite metadata and VOResource in sync in the common universe of discourse. This will probably lead to early drafts of VOResource 1.1 by Cape Town.

TAPRegExt: 1.1 will go to a public WD soon -- the main question there is whether to factor out the parts relevant to UWS and have a separate capability for standalone UWS services.

Work on Registry extensions for VOEvent services, HiPS, or VOSpace will continue or start depending on input by the respective WGs.

We will continue maintenance of the Registry system and contents, as well as our validation operations.

Semantics

Vocabularies / Thesauri / Ontologies

Coordinate and/or influence the development of knowledge bases which support IVOA standards and curation initiatives, in particular

• The Unified Astronomy Thesaurus (UAT)
• Taxonomy of Facilities / Telescopes / Instruments
• UCDs : update for a better coverage on Planetary data

Liaise with DC&P

Provide a forum for the joint discussion of standards development outside of the IVOA which influence curation and preservation activities, in particular:

• Semantics terms defined in the DAL specification for DataLink
• The Research Data Alliance

Data Curation & Preservation

Among the current topics of interest :

• Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs)
• Following the activities of the Research Data Alliance to identify topics and outcomes of interest for the IVOA community and encourage people to join the RDA activities in domains where the IVOA communities can share expertise and lessons learnt.

Education

Important points for EduIG are:

• citizen science as a learning experience for volunteers
• multilinguality
• publication into VO of data of educational observatories (e.g. VAPE)
• registry and repository for educational resources
• development and sharing of materials and practices to be used in schools

Knowledge Discovery in Databases

The main focus of the KDD interest group will be on redefining its charta. Main questions for 2016 are:

• how to ensure a simple data access required for machine learning algorithms
• how to deal with structural/infrastructural challenges when storing and exchanging code
• how to standardize the execution of code close to the data
• how to provide explorative support and data visualization

Operations

Key areas for the operations interest group for early 2016 include:

• the development of common framework for evaluating the consistency of VO services with the standards they purport to implement. This includes a common definition of the requirements for VO services and a consistent measurement of the comliance to these requirements.
• ensuring that the recently agreed upon procedures for ridding the registries of obsolete services are working
• minimizing the downtime for VO services

Theory

Main goal of Theory I.G. is to build the reference implementations for SimDAL and finalize the standard. The roadmap is the following

• Build two implementations of the three parts of SimDAL
• Build a client / validator
• Update the SimDAL document
• Present these implementations at Cape Town InterOp.

Time Domain

Working with DAL to bring VOEvent Transport Protocol to Recommendation status.

Still expecting engagement from CSP, Exec etc re plans for community engagement since the time domain has been recognized as a priority area for the VO.

Standard and Processes

Working on an updated version of the Document Standards, expected for 2016:

• Implementation of Errata and Endorsed Notes
• Implementation of the RFC process as discussed during the Sydney Interop, with a 6 week RFC period including both Community and TCG comments.

Science Priorities

The renewed CSP Terms of Reference support the stronger emphasis in IVOA on engagement with the large astronomy projects, and on guiding the priority area developments via use cases and requirements. In this period the CSP has lead the organisation of the “Interoperability of data from major astronomy projects” at the May 2016 IVOA Interoperability Meeting.