IVOA Executive Committee Meeting (FM15)

May 18 2005 @ 12.30-15.30 Local Time (Kyoto)

Logistics

• The meeting will be held in the Kyoto International Conference Centre, Room 104.
• A working lunch will be provided
• Those attending by phone will be called from Kyoto - please provide number to Masatoshi

Agenda (Draft)

1. Roll Call
2. Minutes of FM13
3. Review of Actions
4. Reports from VO projects (to be uploaded to web page)
5. Reports from WGs
6. Progress on Technical Roadmap
   • review of milestones
   • general review on technical progress : are we still focused ?
7. Key IVOA positions
   • new Deputy chair
   • Secretary and Technical Lead
   • Applications Interest Group
8. Kyoto meeting - review of progress
9. Prague 2006 conference : next steps
10. IVOA Calendar
11. AOB
12. Summary of Actions

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Reports from the Projects

(please upload you projects here - or email to Nic Walton) -- NicholasWalton - 18 May 2005
See also IvoaExecMeetingTM14.

AstroGrid - AndyLawrence, 13 May 2005

Progress Report

AstroGrid just passed a major milestone - our first public release of an open system for astronomical end-users - AstroGrid-Release V1.0. This is a preliminary release, with limited documentation and known bugs, but we are encouraging astronomers to register, start using the system, and feedback their experiences. We anticipate a fuller release in late summer - V1.1. This will be a release of an improved end-user system and a release of the AstroGrid software suite, which of course all other VO projects are welcome to make use of. Since the very recent announcement, we have 26 new registered users, making 71 in total now; it will be interesting to see how this grows.

The release is described on AstroGrid News and is available at http://www.astrogrid.org/release-v1.0

This release has a portal; access to virtual storage (MySpace); a browsable Registry; a query builder; a workflow building system; some simplified "science services" parameter driven tasks; and links to third party applications, like TopCat and Aladin. Some things work directly through the portal, using Cocoon. Others are launched on the client machine using Java Webstart, using an "AstroGrid Desktop".

Given that we now have a fully working system, we are having vigorous debates about how to maintain and support such a system, and the relation between the AstroGrid project and the UK data centres. (I bet this all sounds familiar to some of you ..)

The other thing of note is that we running a workshop for users in July in Cambridge. For further details see the news announcement, or the full details here.

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Euro-VO - PeterQuinn, 11 Apr 2005

The final demonstration for the AVO project (and the end of the project) occurred at the ESA Space Astronomy Centre (ESAC), Villafranca Spain, from 25-26 January 2005. A full report can be found at http://www.euro-vo.org/twiki/bin/view/Avo/AvoDemo2005. This occasion also marked the initiation of the Euro-VO program. I would like AVO to be removed from the IVOA membership and replaced by Euro-VO (using the existing www.euro-vo.org as the home site for the moment). Euro-VO will be represented on the IVOA Exec by myself and Martin Kessler from ESAC. I ask that the IVOA Exec recognize and accept this transition.

The Euro-VO work program will be executed by three new organizations. The EURO-VO Data Centre Alliance (DCA), the Euro-VO Technology Centre (VOTC) and the EURO-VO Facility Centre (VOFC). A Memorandum of Understanding supporting the Euro-VO program has been drafted between ESO, ESA, PPARC, INAF, INSU, INTA, Max Planck Gesellschaft, NOVA and PPARC and is expected to be signed by mid-2005. A successful proposal (VO-TECH) to the EC FP6 scheme was lead by Andy Lawrence and generated 6.6 million Euro in funds. This contains 12 new software engineering positions who will work with 12 contributed positions from the six partner organizations (U.Edinburgh, U.Leicester, U.Cambridge, ESO, CDS, INAF) to execute a three year work program on VO infrastructure and tool development. VO-TECH is the first project under the VOTC umbrella and successfully started in January 2005. The DCA Executive Board had its first meeting in December 2004. A proposal to the EC FP6 for DCA funding was lead by Francoise Genova from CDS in March 2005. The proposal is seeking approximately 2 million Euro in funds for DCA startup over the next two years. Results from this proposal are expected by mid-year. Start-up activities for the VOFC are foreseen for 2005/2006 under the joint leadership of ESO and ESA. In line with the IVOA roadmap, Euro-VO is endeavoring to make 2005 a year of data centre take-up by hosting a workshop at ESO in June. The workshop currently has 80 registered participants and will conduct a series of overviews, lectures and tutorials aimed at giving data centre and large project staff the ability to publish data within the existing VO infrastructure (see http://euro-vo.org/workshop2005 for details).

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Reports from WGs

GWS-WG - GuyRixon, 2005-05-13

VO Support interfaces was due to go to v1.0 and PR in January. It didn't, because there was no spare effort to write its normative WSDL. The WSDL contract has now been produced as part of VO Support Interfaces 0.22. Progress should be faster from here on in. Completion to full recommendation in the summer of 2005 seems likely.

VO basic profile is still at v0.1. This profile mandates VO support interfaces, so it is waiting on the latter.

VOStore is now at v0.18 following meetngs between NVO and AstroGrid and recent input from Caltech. There are now several local prototypes of this standard and serious interoperability trials are likely to begin shortly after the Kyoto meeting. VOStore cannot be properly finished and signed off until the security arrangements are agreed; however, the security is largely orthoganal to the rest of the problem and the interoperability trials don't need the full security solution. Completion to v1.0 and PR during 2005 seems probable.

The Asynchronous Activities work-package has spawned the Universal Worker Service specification. This is an attempt to refactor the asynchronicity features of AstroGrid's Common Execution Architecture to work with the OASIS WS-Resource Framework suite of standards and so to use some toolkits and software libraries from outside the VO movement. If IVOA chooses to standardize something based on CEA, then UWS is the proposed web-service interface. The timescale for completing this work package depends on the level of interest and involvement after Kyoto. Completion during 2005 is possible but not certain.

The single-sign-on (SSO) work-package has drafted several new documents: a review of Shibboleth (requested at the Cambridge MA and Pune meetings); a specification of the trust model for authentication (including the procedures for providing identity certificates without pain); and an architecture for the SSO support services that allows integration with Shibboleth. These documents are being presented for the first time in Kyoto, so the group's reaction is not known. If the basic ideas in the documents find favour, then I would expect the SSO profile to go to 1.0 and PR in the last quarter of 2005. Research in the time since the Pune meeting has led to one document (the proposed message-security protocol at v0.1) being deprecated as inappropriate for the IVO's needs. Sometimes we need to go back to find the right path!

All the current drafts are linked from the GWS-WG page for the Kyoto meeting.

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UCDs - AndreaPreiteMartinez - 13 May 2005

According to the RoadMap approved in the InterOp meeting of Pune, a RFC on the PR document "UCD (Unified Content Descriptor) - moving to UCD1+. Version 1.06" was issued on Oct27. At that date there were three ucd documents: the main PR ucd document, the list of ucd words (WD-20040823), and a Note describing the subdivision of the em-spectrum.

Although the community was solicited before the end of the RFC period, only 4 answers with comments were received. But the interesting point was that most of the comments referred to the list of ucd words (WD) and not to the PR document.

In the mean time, activity on UCDs went on with the collection of comments and suggestions on the list of words, the release of an updated version of the list (WD-20050429), and with the development of a number of tools devoted to the handling/assigning of UCDs. For the Kyoto InterOp2005 meeting we propose to merge the UCD documents into one main document for which we will reopen the prescribed period of RFC.

At the same meeting we will start a joint discussion with the VOEvent WG on the semantic aspects of the "event vocabulary".

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Registry wg, TonyLinde, 13 May 2005

There have been significant spurts of activity on the wg mailing list over recent months, many of them initiated and coordinated by Ray Plante, to whom we all offer our thanks for his efforts. These discussions have led to a number of proposals which will be discussed at this meeting:

• significant changes to the RM document --> V1.1
• changes to the resource schema
• ways of registering applications and conforming to the UWS
• creation of an IVOA-maintained 'registry of registries'
• the appropriate ways of querying a registry (VOQL-like, XQuery-like, etc)
• how to annotate records with quality information
• curation of resource information

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