InterOpMay2004 Applications

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Afternoon Session, Tuesday May 25, 2004

Overview

This will be the first meeting for the Applications Interest Group. The role of this group is to make sure that members of the VO community are aware of the applications that all of us are developing and to ensure that we can pass on the lessons we have each learned in writing VO tools.

This session will consist of three parts. The first few minutes will be spent introducing the members to each other and reviewing the proposed charter for the group and how we anticipate using the Twiki and E-mail facilities. This is basically a brief business meeting for the interest group.

The second part of the meeting is intended to allow developers to briefly describe and demonstrate the VO tools that are now available. The presentations should include the capabilities provided to the users, how VO techologies, protocols, etc are used (or not used!) within the tool, and if the tools might be useful as a component in some larger VO application. In addition to stand-alone tools, presenters may wish to talk about libraries for implementing VO capabilities. In particular, a comparison of the capabilities and reach of the various VOTable libraries is included.

The remainder of the afternoon is a discussion of what we have learned in building these tools and libraries. Are the existing VO formats/protocols useful? How can they be improved? Are there elements in a VO infrastructure that would help in building and delivering applications? A roadmap for this discussion is suggested in the agenda, but participants should feel free to bring up the topics they deem most important. The sense of this discussion will be reported back to the meeting as a whole in the plenary session.

Agenda

• Introductions
• Role of the Apps Interest Group (15 minutes)
  • What is this group for?
  • Does the current charter make sense?
  • How should the group function?
  • How do we use the Twiki, mailing list?
• Current Tools and Libraries
  • Existing VO applications (10 minutes each)
    • AVO Prototype: Mark Allen
    • Aladin: Thomas Boch [ .pdf ]
    • SkyQuery: Tamas Budavari (.ppt)
    • GAVO Cross Matcher: Gerard Lemson
    • Spectral and Filter Services: Tamas Budavari (.ppt)
    • TOPCAT: Mark Taylor
    • Common Execution Architecture: Paul Harrison
    • VOPlot: Ajit Kembhavi
    • VOFilter: Chenzhou Cui (if available)
    • VO Data Inventory Service: Tom McGlynn
    • Other applications (TBD)
  • Existing VO Libraries
    • Comparisons/contrasts of VOTables parsers/formatters (STIL, McGlynn, Kale, etc)
• Lessons learned
  • What are the obstacles to developing VO applications?
    • How do existing VO standards help in the existing tools?
    • Where would it be most helpful to have additional standardized protocols/formats
  • How can we share software?
  • Are there other libraries that should be distributed?
  • Does the VO need any common infrastructure to support application development?
    • Standardized documentation
    • Configuration management
    • Testing
  • Portability of applications
  • What underlying technologies do we need to standardize on? (SOAP/CGI, Java, ...)