AlasdairAllan < IVOA

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<img src="%ATTACHURLPATH%/snapshot_small.jpg" alt="Alasdair Allan"  width="300" height="225" align="right" />
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*Alasdair Allan* <BR>
[[http://www.estar.org.uk/][eSTAR Project]]<BR>
School of Physics<BR>
University of Exeter<BR>
Stocker Road<BR>
Exeter<BR>
EX4 4QL<BR><BR>

Tel. +44-1392-264160<BR>   
Email aa@astro.ex.ac.uk<BR>
Web http://www.astro.ex.ac.uk/people/aa/

   * [[%ATTACHURL%/adassxii_paper.ps][eSTAR: Building an Observational GRID]]<BR>
     Allan A. et al., 2003, ADASS XII, Payne H.E., Jedrzejewski R.I., Hook R.N. (eds),<BR>
     pp. 13, ASP Conf. Series 295, Astronomical Society of the Pacific, San. Fran.
   * [[%ATTACHURL%/avo_paper.ps][eSTAR: Telescopes and Databases as a Single Information Grid]]<BR>
     Naylor T. et al., 2003, Towards an International Virtual Observatory,<BR>
    Proceedings of the ESO Workshop held in Garching, Germany, 10-14 June 2002, in press

---+++ Web Services Session at the [[InterOpMay2003][IVOA Interoperability Meeting]], 12-16 May 2003

I presented a short talk about the <FONT COLOR="red">e</FONT>STAR project, and the implications of the technologies emerging from this work on Web and Grid Services, at the Interoperability Meeting at Cambridge in May.

<BLOCKQUOTE>
*<FONT COLOR="red">e</FONT>STAR: Intelligent Agents and Web Services*

The <FONT COLOR="red">e</FONT>STAR Project is a programme to build a prototype robotic telescope
network. Intelligent Agent technology has proved to be a vital part of
this project, providing unified access to archive data, to telescopes
and to bibliographic data by carrying out resource discovery, data
mining and observing tasks. We discuss details of agent technology, and
outline why we believe that the main user of the proposed Grid will be
software agents rather than human astronomers. We also discuss the the
implications for web and grid services, with agents being both
consumers and providers of such services.

[[%ATTACHURL%/presentation.ppt][eSTAR: Intelligent Agents and Web Services]] (Power Point, 775k)<BR>
[[%ATTACHURL%/cookie_daemon.tar.gz][Cookie Daemon Sample Code]] (tarball, 8k)

</BLOCKQUOTE>

---+++ <FONT COLOR="red">e</FONT>STAR Testbed Catalogue Broker Service

The <FONT COLOR="red">e</FONT>STAR [[http://www.astro.ex.ac.uk/estar/services/services.html][testbed broker service]] has both a REST and SOAP interface, although the REST service is not yet complient with the NVO cone search specifications. The service will resolve a target name, if necessary, initallity using the CDS Sesame SOAP service, but falling back to use CDS SIMBAD if Sesame is unavailable.

It will then goes off and try to retrieve the cone search you specified on
whatever catalogue you specified, falling back to alternative sources to
retrieve the catalogue if its first choice of 3rd party service is
unavailable.

The returned catalogue is parsed and then output in the formatted as per
user specifications, currently supported formats are Cluster and JCMT
pointing, although I'm in the process of adding
VOTABLE support.

At that point any [[http://vizier.u-strasbg.fr/viz-bin/VizieR][Vizier]] and [[http://archive.eso.org/skycat/][SkyCat]] catalogue (and a few others), are 
available via this service in VOTABLE format irrespective of the original
format that the 3rd party service returned.
This topic: IVOA > AlasdairAllan
Topic revision: r7 - 2003-09-25 - AlasdairAllan