IVOA Executive Committee Meeting (FM19)

Weds May 17 2006 @ 12.30-14.30 Local Time (Victoria, Canada)

Contents

Logistics

Agenda

Roll Call and Agenda
Minutes of TM18
Review of Actions
Participation of Brazilian VO (continued)
Review the proposed charter of the Semantics WG
Approval of new IVOA Recommendation(s)
IAU in Prague : status report
IVOA demonstration stand during the IAU GA in Prague
Autumn Interoperability meeting in Moscow
AOB
- Summary of this meeting
- Date and Venue of the next exec meeting (telecon ?)
Summary of Actions

Reports from the Projects

ArVO

AstroGrid

China-VO

CVO

DRACO Italy

Euro-VO

France VO

GAVO

HVO

Japan-VO

Korean VO

NVO

RVO

RVO current report : from OlegMalkov

Meetings
- A meeting "Virtual Observatory: scientific problems and techniques for their solution" was organized by the RVO in Moscow 10-11 of April 2006. Some 40 participants attended the meeting, and about 15 presentations were made, including 4 demo. The program of the meeting can be found at http://www.inasan.ru/eng/conferences/rvo_0406/ The presentations (mostly in English) are at http://www.inasan.ru/eng/conferences/rvo_0406/presentations.html
- Interoperability meeting (Moscow, Sep 2006) together with Small Projects meeting will be organized in cooperation with IVOA colleagues
Working groups
- RVO data
  - Information on 100 Russian on-line resources of astronomical data, prepared in 20 observatories and institutions, is collected. Seventeen of them are registered in the NVO registry. Russian astronomical resources are announced at http://www.inasan.rssi.ru/eng/rvo/rus_res.html
  - ADS and INES mirrors in INASAN are supported
  - About 10 catalogues of various types of binaries are prepared and submitted to CDS
- Technologies of information infrastructure of RVO
  - Working contacts with the developers of the AstroGrid systems in the UK has been established
  - The AstroGrid RVO Community Center for scientific problem solving over the distributed information repositories accumulated in the world has been established. The Center has been created at the IPI RAS on the basis of the AstroGrid system developed in the UK and kindly delivered by the authors for the needs of RVO. Opening of the AstroGrid RVO is one of the first steps on implementation of the Information Infrastructure of the Russian Virtual Observatory (IIRVO). Research groups and individual researchers are invited for registering as AstroGrid RVO users. More details on the AstroGrid RVO capabilities can be found at the Announcement of the AstroGrid RVO (http://synthesis.ipi.ac.ru//synthesis/projects/astromedia/astroannounce) that contains also instructions for the registration of users
  - The AstroGrid capabilities have been tried during implementation of facilities for solving of the distant galaxies discovery problem (http://synthesis.ipi.ac.ru//synthesis/projects/astromedia/distgal)
- The database of Moscow astronomical plate collection and maintenance of the General Catalogue of Variable Stars
  - An electronic catalog of several thousands of plates of the Sternberg Institute's collection has been compiled
  - A draft operator's manual for scanning Sternberg Institute's plates with the CREO EverSmart Supreme scanners has been prepared
  - Scanning Moscow and Zvenigorod plates has been started in Zvenigorod, scanning Sternberg Institute's plates has been started in Moscow in a trial mode
  - The scanning laboratory in Zvenigorod has developed its Internet site
  - Equipment needed to keep and process data and to provide access to data obtained in the process of scanning has been purchased
  - The main part of the work on preparation of the 78th Name List of Variable Stars has been finished
  - The work on complete identification of GCVS stars with positional catalogs using finding charts, which took several years, has been completed. As a result, virtually all GCVS stars now have coordinates precise enough for automatic identifications
- Informational technologies in astronomy
  - Infrastucture of CAS was developed and working prototype in SAI-MSU could be accessed at http://vo.astronet.ru
  - Radial query (conesearch) was implemented to following big catalogs: USBO-B1, 2MASS (psc,xsc), Tycho2
  - We developed the biggest russian portal on astronomy http://www.astronet.ru/
  - We developed very fast algorithm (Q3C) for search and xmatching of very big astronomical catalogs in RDBMS. Realization for RDBMS. PostgreSQL is freely available from http://q3c.sf.net

SVO

VO-India

Reports from WGs

Grid and Web Services Working Group

Semantics/UCD WG

Report of chairman of the Semantics/UCD WG

The following is the list of actions decided in the last Interop meeting (Madrid), with the present status, and of other activities of the WG:

At the end of 2005 the list of UCD-words was approved by the IVOA EXEC and became an IVOA Recommendation: ?The UCD1+ controlled vocabulary. Version 1.11, 31 December 2005?

On the same time the WG defined and discussed on a possible standard procedure to revise or update the list of UCD-words. First an internal Technical Note was written, then a Working Draft (?Maintenance of the list of UCD words Version 1.00?). In mid-March I decided to move the WD document to the level of Proposed Recommendation, opening a RFC to the Interop community.

The RFC period ended on April 12 with 4 comments, all accepted. The PR document has been revised accordingly (version 1.2 of 2006-04-21), and sent to the the chair of the IVOA Technical Coordination Group.

A chart for the new UCD/Semantics WG was presented to the IVOA EXEC in January 2006 (this text can be found in the ?Latest Documents? section of the UCD-WG web page at http://www.ivoa.net/twiki/bin/view/IVOA/IvoaUCD )

Work on a Standard Vocabulary for the VO started at the beginning of 2006. A first internal note was written and posted on the UCD-WG page. First results will be presented at the InterOpMay2006 meeting.

UCDs were intensively used in two data centers (CDS/Vizier, HEASARCH). At least these two examples of actual use of UCDs will be discussed at the InterOpMay2006 meeting.

Data Models WG

Data Access Layer WG

Registry WG

The major work of this group has taken place within the tiger team set up at Kyoto to develop a data model for the Registry metadata. This group has had numerous telecons resulting in proposals to put to the Victoria meeting, hopefully leading to a V1.0 standard by end of June. These proposals are listed at:

together with the registry interface specification:

http://www.ivoa.net/twiki/bin/view/IVOA/RegistryInterface

Document Standards WG -

this group is no longer active

VOEvent WG

VOTable WG

VOQL WG

1) General

The working drafts of ADQL and Skynode interface are still under preparation. The due date was Nov 15 in the last year. We needed more time to generalize and finalize the documents. We would like to finish them in June(?).

The updated ADQL schema will be preseneted at the Victria meeting. Some modification is made for simplifying the strucure and for fixing some minor problem.

The ADQL-Light, which conforms to the ADQL core specification, is under prepartion and will be presented at the Victria meeting.

Standardization of the content of a returned VOTable is under preparation and will be presented at the Victria meeting.

We would like to finalize how to describe the specification of the xmatch functionality on the Victria meeting. Which algorithm should be mandatory for the cross-match skynode ?

2) JVO

SkyNode toolkit has been released at the following URL: http://jvo.nao.ac.jp/download/skynode-toolkit/ JVO has released three versions after the last IVOA meeting. New version will be released before the Victria meeting.
The degree of the conformance to the standard SQL is beeing investigated for several major DBMSs (Oracle, PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQLServer, DB2...). It is also investigated that how the object data types are treated on those DBMS.

3) NVO

Maria will fill here after she comes back to work. *

Applications IG

Theory IG

Data Curation and Preservation IG

This topic: IVOA > WebHome > IvoaRepMin > IvoaExecMeetingFM19
Topic revision: r5 - 2006-05-05 - NicholasWalton