Alasdair Allan
eSTAR Project
School of Physics
University of Exeter
Stocker Road
Exeter
EX4 4QL

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

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

Web Services Session at the IVOA Interoperability Meeting, 12-16 May 2003

I presented a short talk about the eSTAR project, and the implications of the technologies emerging from this work on Web and Grid Services, at the Interoperability Meeting at Cambridge in May.

eSTAR: Intelligent Agents and Web Services

The eSTAR 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.

eSTAR: Intelligent Agents and Web Services (Power Point, 775k)
Cookie Daemon Sample Code (tarball, 8k)