IVOA Executive Committee Meeting (FM23)
Sunday May 13 2007 @ 17.30-20.00 (Beijing Local Time)
Logistics
Full Meeting: Floor 2, Meeting Room 5 (Beijing Oriental Culture Hotel, Beijing, China)
Agenda
- Roll Call and Agenda
- Minutes of TM22
- Review of Actions
- Approval of new IVOA Recommendation(s) [standing item]
- Discussion of the IVOA Assessment (FG/DDY)
- Working Groups and Interest Groups
- Standardisation process: highlights, concerns, goals (RW)
- Proposal for creation of Solar System IG
- Status of the Assessment of Implementation of IVOA standards in Data Centres (DS/CA)
- Status of the preparation of the Fall 2007 Interoperability meeting (NW)
- Status of the preparation of the Spring 2008 Interoperability meeting (FP)
- Data and venue of the next Exec meeting
- AOB
- Summary of Actions
Papers for Meeting
Reports from the Projects
ArVO
During the last few months, the main focus of
AstroGrid has been on two main areas. The first is improving robustness and reliability of core services, where we have made significant improvements. The second is updating and completing end user documentation, which is also now much improved and close to completion. Meanwhile we have also been undertaking a review of "fitness for purpose", looking towards our operational deployment phase next year. This has included both a survey of users, and an internal "brainstorming" review.
We have recently had official notification of the success of our most recent funding proposal. We have been funded at a healthy level -three quarters of our request - but for just two years rather than the requested five. This means we are funded through to the end of 2009. The feedback was essentially that reviewers were very impressed with what we had achieved, and remain convinced of the potential, but were not yet quite convinced that we were ready to be funded as a steady-state operations project. (This is a good judgment of the worldwide VO perhaps !) We will be reviewed again in eighteen months.
Australia-VO
China-VO
Preparing for the IVOA interoperability meeting has the highest priority for China-VO. 104 qualified registrations have been received. It is the first time that number of attendees of IVOA interoperability meeting reaches 100. Now, the meeting is going on in Beijing.
A beta version of VO-DAS system has been finished before the IVOA meeting. Some basic data access functions are realized, including synchronous and asynchronous query, data format conversion,
ADQL parsing, huge volume data (>3M records) query.
A beta version of
SkyMouse 2.0 was finished before the IVOA meeting. New functions including Linux screen word-capturing, VO-Registry resource harvesting, have been added.
FitHAS (Fits Header Archiving System) is developed, which can help data providers import headers of large amount of FITS files into a database.
Three talks will be given at the IVOA meeting on VO-DAS,
SkyMouse and
FitHAS respectively.
CVO
VObs.it (aka DRACO) Italy
Euro-VO
In the framework of the EURO-VO Data Centre Alliance and Facility Centre, 2 major workshops are being organized in 2007:
The "Astronomy Spectroscopy and the VO workshop" took place on 21-23 March 2007 at ESAC. More than 120 people attended with a wide variety of attendees (scientists, usual VO people, developers, implementers, IVOA WG chairs and IVOA chair). That was the occasion to present VO work in the context of astronomical spectroscopy to the scientists and get requirements and feedback from the scientists to the VO people. In the coming months, workshop proceedings will be published and an IVOA note will be compiled by the Workshop Scientific and Technical Organizing Committee.
Full details can be found at :
http://esavo.esac.esa.int/SpectroscopyAndVOWorkshopMarch2007/
The "EURO-VO workshop on How to publish data in the VO" will take place on 25-29 June 2007 at ESAC. The workshop is geared towards data centres and large projects to acquire the knowledge and experience necessary to allow them to become "publishers" in the VO. Registration is open and programme is in under preparation depending of the requirements of participants when they register.
Full details can be found at :
http://esavo.esac.esa.int/EuroVOWorkshopJune2007/
The EURO-VO mailing list is being built up and now contains about 400 people. People can still subscribe through the EURO-VO helpdesk at:
http://help.euro-vo.org/esupport/index.php?_m=news&_a=view
The EURO-VO project, through the Facility Centre, which is jointly
managed by ESO and ESA, issued a Call for Proposals for astronomical projects driven by the Virtual Observatory concept and making use of Virtual Observatory tools and applications (see
http://www.euro-vo.org/pub/fc/call.html).
This followed a suggestion from the EURO-VO Science Advisory Committee. Nine proposals were received. After evaluation by the EURO-VO Science Advisory Committee for scientific merit and by the project for technical
feasibility three proposals were selected.
The successful teams will receive the necessary scientific support and technical contact points to complete their projects by December 2007. It is expected that the final results will be published in peer-reviewed research publications.
Work in on-going to set-up a EURO-VO presence at the next Joint
European National Astronomy Meeting (JENAM 2007), to be held in Yerevan, Armenia. Various talks will be given at the "Science with Virtual Observatories" Symposium and a booth will be manned with on-line demonstrations.
France VO
GAVO
HVO
Japan-VO
Since April 2007 Dr. Kawanomoto, who worked to implement spectral line tools, left the JVO project. Dr. Kawanomoto will work to construct a new generation imaging camera,
HyperCAM, for the Subaru telescope.
JSPS approved to run the Core-to-Core program by the JVO in the fiscal year 2007, that strongly supports activities of JVO.
JVO made a trial implementation of the
NaReGi (National Research Grid Initiative in Japan) middleware into a part of its data analysis service by JVO. It was found that the middleware is still premature for operations phase, however, a graphical user interface for the Work Flow builder seems very useful. JVO will continue to evaluate the middleware, and will contribute to comment the middleware for the
NaReGi project to improve it.
Korean VO
NVO
RVO
SVO
VO-India
Data Access Layer WG
Data Models WG
Grid and Web Services Working Group
Registry WG
Semantics/UCD WG
VOEvent
VOQL WG
VOTable WG
Applications IG
Astro-RG IG
A very successful workshop was held at
OGF 20, Manchester, UK (9 May 2007). Details of the agenda are at
IVOA.GgfIvoaMay07WorkShop and the presentation materials
linked from the
OGF20 schedule page. It is apparent that there is increasing interest in the use of distributed computing infrastructure, and that there is activity outside of the IVOA in this area. The IVOA Astro-RG Interest Group is a good forum to allow more engagement with large external groups such as LOFAR/ SKA who may need to integrate their grid based computational systems to the VO.
Data Curation and Preservation IG
Theory IG
--
NicholasWalton - 12 May 2007