IVOA Executive Committee Meeting (FM25)

Thurs 27 Sept 2007 @ 16.45-18.30 GMT

---

Logistics

Location: Hoyle Committee Room, IoA, Cambridge, UK - see InterOpSep2007

Agenda (draft 20070917)

1. Roll Call and Agenda
2. Minutes of TM24
3. Review of Actions
4. Approval of new IVOA Recommendation(s) [Standing Item]
5. Working Groups and Interest Groups
   • Clarification/Modification of the Standardization process (BH) Process and checklist as discussed in June
   • Revival of Standards and Process WG (FG, BH)
   • Policy Discussion of WG Transitions to Maintenance Mode (DD)
6. Status of the Assessment Working Group (DD)
7. Discussion of Google Sky, the VO, and the IVOA (BH)
8. IVOA and the next IAU GA (MO, RW)
9. Discussion of Possible New IVOA Members (FG, RW)
10. Support of VO Training Programs (BH)
11. Status of preparation for spring 2008 Interop (FP)
12. Status and venue for the fall 2008 Interop (BH)
13. Date and venue of the next Exec meeting
14. AOB
15. Summary of Actions

Reports from the Projects

ArVO

---

AstroGrid

---

Australia-VO

---

China-VO

---

CVO

---

Euro-VO

The EURO-VO Science Advisory Committee (SAC), which provides scientific advice to the project, met for the third time on June 18 at ESTEC, Noordwijk, The Netherlands. SAC members were updated on the latest EURO-VO developments. The meeting agenda with all presentations is available at http://www.euro-vo.org/twiki/bin/view/Fc/SacMeeting03.

In the framework of the Joint European and National Astronomy Meeting, JENAM 2007, held in Armenia on August 20-25, a two-day EAS Symposium on "Science with the Virtual Observatories" took place (http://www.aras.am/JENAM-2007/EASsymp08.htm). EURO-VO astronomers participated with various invited talks.

The workshop "Astronomy with Virtual Observatories", which will see an active participation of EURO-VO scientists, is to be held in October in Pune, India. For more details see http://www.iucaa.ernet.in/~voiwork/

Negociation on the project 'Euro-VO Astronomical Infrastructure for Data Access' (EuroVO-AIDA) have been opened by the European Commission by the end of July. The project had been submitted in the frame of the first 'Scientific Data Repositories' of the 7th Framework Program. The outcome of negociations should be known soon.

---

France VO

France VO teams have been actively preparing the Cambridge Interoperability meeting (21 French participants will attend the meeting, from Besancon, Lyon, Marseille, Paris and Strasbourg Observatories and from the Service d'Aeronomie.

The French VO WG and IG chairs and vice-chairs also actively participated in the evaluation of the Proposed Recommendations during the Summer period.

---

GAVO

---

HVO

---

Japan-VO

---

Korean VO

---

NVO

NVO team members D. Tody and J. McDowell completed their terms as chairs of the IVOA Data Access Layer Working Group and Data Models Working Group, respectively. M. Graham has been appointed as chair of the Grid and Web Services Working Group, and R. Hanisch has been appointed as chair of the Data Curation and Preservation Interest Group.

E. Schreier and R. Moore have resigned from the NVO Executive Committee, and G. Fabbiano and T. McGlynn have agreed to replace them. Pepi and Tom bring extensive experience from the perspective data center operations.

The NVO data discovery portal tiger team has been working to refine the requirements and develop a design for a new primary interface to VO resources. Our goal is to make this interface available to the user community in January 2008.

Much effort has gone into the NVO Book, a compendium of lectures and tutorials from the NVO Summer Schools and other background materials. The book should be ready to send to the publisher, the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, by the end of July.

R. Hanisch submitted a proposal for a session about Virtual Observatories and Internet-enabled research collaboratories to the AAAS annual meeting (Boston, February 2008). This proposal was accepted.

The complete report of NVO activities for the period April-June 2007 is available at http://www.us-vo.org/pubs/files/FY07Q3.pdf.

---

RVO

---

SVO

---

VObs.it

No report was posted on the TM24, FM23 and TM22 web pages. This report summarizes VObs.it activities since TM21 (5 December 2006).

Due to financial problems with INAF, the foreseen 2007 funding for VObs.it (125KEuro) was frozen, and may become available towards the end this year. This had important impacts on this year’s plan of activities, with particular reference to the support foreseen for porting of a number of data centres into the VO. In any case, the INAF Information Systems Unit filled in by supporting for 2007 (on 2006 funds) two persons for VO activities, one in Trieste, one in Milan. Additional resources are received through the EU-funded projects (VO-Tech and VO-DCA). There are much better perspectives for 2008, when the funding flow is expected to return to normal.

Support of operations is continuing for IA2, the INAF data centre located in Trieste and containing TNG data and the first data acquired during the Italian time at the LBT. IA2 is ingesting data from the LBT Scientific Demonstration Time (SDT) and distributing them to the LBT scientific community. Mirror sites at Tucson and Heidelberg are being supported.

The VIMOS archive in INAF/IASF Milan is now fully compliant with VO standards and is being routinely supported.

Work is continuing on the inclusion of data from numerical simulations in the VO:

- within VObs.it, the Italian Theory VO (ITVO) activity continued as a collaboration among INAF (Trieste, Catania and Teramo), CINECA and the University of Trieste; ITVO is partially supported by the VO-Tech EU project;

- the ITVO databases of cosmological simulations available in Trieste and Catania were harmonised; an interoperability demo including the use of Aladin was made at the VO-Tech meeting in March;

- besides providing theory data, ITVO can also be considered as a sandbox where the IVOA theory standards are being tested and checked;

- within the IVOA Theory Interest Group, VObs.it is contributing to the definition of the Data Model for numerical simulations and of the related access protocol (SNAP); the validation of the Data Model has been carried out by a database implementation c/o the ITVO Trieste group;

- the BaSTI facility providing stellar evolution models has been converted to a database structure and is being ported to the VO; the code building the models has been ported onto the EGEE grid infrastructure and is now populating the database with improved physics;

Work on generalised UCDs and ontology, developed in close collaboration with CDS and work on 3D visualisation (VisIVO) and data mining techniques (AstroNeural) are also progressing in the framework of the VO-Tech project.

Within the VO-DCA EU project, work continued to interoperate the VO with computational grids. Among the tasks performed:

- staff from VObs.it participated in the IVOA Tiger Team on Authentication Procedures (single-sign-on);

- a Web application handling the release of certificates was implemented (in coordination with IVOA and AstroGrid.

Grid-related activities are quite advanced: work is being invested in allowing the compute-intensive VO applications to run on the Grid, and viceversa Grid applications to access VO resources, so to allow a smooth two-ways integration of the two standards.

- INAF is leading the “astrophysics cluster” in the EGEE-III proposal submitted to the EU; the aim is to port applications onto the computational Grid;

- a test benchmarking different systems to access databases from the Grid (GRelC, OGSA-DAI, AMGA, GDSE) was carried out in collaboration with the Universities of Lecce and Bari and the INFN sites of Padova and Bologna;

- a school on application porting on the Grid was organised in Trieste for INAF, Planck and Vo-DCA staff (26 Feb - 2 Mar).

“Grid-enabled Astronomy”, the proceedings of the Grid.it and DRACO workshop held at INAF headquarters in November 2005 has been published by the Polimetrica publisher, as a book - see http://www.polimetrica.com/?p=productsMore&iProduct=47&sName=Grid-enabled-Astrophysics-(Leopoldo-Benacchio,-Fabio-Pasian) - and on-line (press Download the electronic publication (FREE)).

---

VO-India

---

---

Reports from WGs & IGs(follows order as at http://www.ivoa.net/forum/)

---

---

Applications WG

---

Data Access Layer WG

---

Data Models WG

---

Grid and Web Services Working Group

---

Registry WG

---

Semantics/UCD WG

---

VOEvent

---

VOQL WG

---

VOTable WG

---

Astro-RG IG

---

Data Curation and Preservation IG

The DCP IG will meet during the Cambridge Interop, and will begin with brief presentations on the status of DCP activities in the US and Europe. Then the floor will be open for discussion of the challenges facing such efforts and the role the IVOA might play in supporting this important work. See InterOpSep2007CP for the agenda and IvoaCP for the IG twiki page.

---

Theory IG

---