IVOA Executive Committee Meeting (FM28)

Sunday May 18 2008 @ 16.00-18.00 GMT (18.00-20.00 European Summer Time)

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Logistics

At Trieste interop - see InterOpMay2008 - Vulcania 2.

Agenda: DRAFT 20080512

1. Roll Call and Agenda
2. Minutes of TM27
3. Project Reports - Significant events only
4. Review of Actions
5. Approval of new IVOA Recommendation(s) [Standing Item]
6. Reports from WG and IG Chairs
7. Background Re: New WG and IG Chairs and Vice Chairs
8. Final Report of Assessment Committee - DD
9. Review of 2008 Roadmap - RW
10. (The following items to be included as time permits)
11. TCG Charter Status - RW,CA
12. Revised Policy on Inactive Members - DD
13. Introduction Package for New WG/IG Chairs - RW,DD
14. Prospective New Members - Update/Status - DD
15. Start Date for Next IVOA Chair - BH
16. CODATA Announcement - DD
17. Fall Interop Status - BH
18. Next Exec Meeting
19. AOB
20. Review of New Action Items

Reports from the Projects

ArVO

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AstroGrid

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Australia-VO

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China-VO

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CVO

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Euro-VO

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France VO

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GAVO

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HVO

The NVO Book—“The National Virtual Observatory: Tools and Techniques for Astro-nomical Research”—was published as Volume 382 in the Astronomical Society of the Pacific Conference Series. The book is based on the materials developed for the three NVO Summer Schools. M. Graham (Caltech), M. Fitzpatrick (NOAO), and T. McGlynn (NASA GSFC/HEASARC) edited the book.

The NVO project had an exhibit at the January AAS Meeting in Austin, Texas. Pre-release components of the data discovery portal were demonstrated, and the theme “NVO Inside” was used to highlight how many organizations are making data and services available through VO protocols. The first edition of the NVO Newsletter was distributed in March to a mailing list of nearly 400 people who have expressed interest in the VO. The Newsletter is also available on the NVO web site.

We are now accepting applications for the fourth NVO Summer School, which will be held in Santa Fe, New Mexico in early September. The Summer School faculty has been planning the program and assessing the need for new or updated software and tutorials.

Much progress was made on the deployment of the new registry schema. All IVOA registries worldwide were scheduled to be updated in late April. Also, initial implementations of VOSpace were under development, and interoperability testing between VOSpaces at Caltech, JHU, and in AstroGrid are planned for the coming quarter.

As the NVO development project comes to a close, we are undertaking a comprehensive review and assessment of all software (applications, tools, libraries) that have been developed in the past 6½ years. The goal is to understand the level of completeness and the long-term value so that we can identify those components that are most essential to support in the future.

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Japan-VO

Korean VO

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NVO

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RVO

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SVO

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VObs.it

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VO-India

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

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Applications WG

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Data Access Layer WG

The DAL WG is actively involved the following areas:

• TAP: In an effort to break the log jam of requirements on the Table Access Protocol, the standards definition work has been divided into two separate but bound efforts, one to address Parametrised querying (TAP/Param) and the second to address ADQL querying (TAP/QL). The TAP Wiki page here explains the rational, the process being followed and the experts active in each effort. Initial drafts for TAP/Param and TAP/QL have been published in advance of the Trieste Interop. These will be (vigorously!) discussed to check fitness for purpose and to identify common requirements enabling us to start to draw together the two TAP halves. This latter may proceed quickly or slowly; that has yet to be discovered, but the process requires their eventual merging.

• SIAP v2: Work on the scope, concept and interface has been undertaken and prototyping efforts from NVO and EuroVO are expected to be shown and discussed in Trieste.

• SSAP V1.04: This document was made an IVOA Recommendation in February 2008. It represents the first of the DAL v2 standards and is considerably more comprehensive than the V1 standards. It is important we get this right and detailed review is essential. Effort will be made to put SIA2 at the level of SSA 1.04. N-D datasets will be considered as long as they have a spatial signature and WCS. Region search and WCS support will be enhanced. Relationships with Other DAL efforts and GWS will be clarified.

• Footprint services: Much work has been undertaken defining Footprint services by both NVO and EuroVO, with prototype services available from a number of sources. Definition of the specification for a DAL Footprint Service Protocol has begun.

Interaction with Registry Working Group

We are especially interested in the Registry WG schema for Service Registration and the various Resource schemata as they present opportunities for DAL services to exploit.

Interaction with Grid and Web Services Working Group

VOSI is of particular importance to DAL services, especially Capabilities and Availability. By their nature, DAL services typically need monitoring by systems administrators, so the work on Availability is particularly relevant.

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Data Models WG

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Grid and Web Services Working Group

The main activity for the GWS working group over the past few months has been VOSpace 1.1. A working draft of the specification, WSDL and schema was released on 16 January 2008. Reference implementations have been/are under development at Caltech, UCSD, JHU, Astrogrid and CDS. At least one of these (UCSD) also interfaces with the iRODS software from SDSC. There has also been work on the VOSpace usage document (Harrison, Morris) which describes the core metadata terms that we will be registering.

Members of the WG have been looking at security issues, including delegation (Rixon, Graham), particularly with a view to a more RESTful approach; and authorisation (Graham).

There has also been work on VOSI (Rixon) and CEA/UWS (Harrison).

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Registry WG

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Semantics/UCD WG

The WG chair (APM) and vice-chair (SD) will not be present at the EXEC as they already had flights booked before the formal invitation was sent.

What we hope to accomplish at this InterOp:

The major subject of discussion will be "Vocabularies in the VO". The WD has been discussed at length, but there are still few open issues to settle down. The most important are

• cross-matching of different vocabularies
• use cases (VOEvent, Registry, ...)
• if and how to go for an IVOA vocabulary

During the InterOp we hope to clarify these (and other) points, and then promote the document to the PR stage.

But here there is a "procedural" problem: the adopted format for the IVOA vocabularies is SKOS, now at the stage of W3C Working Draft. SKOS will not become a W3C REC until (hopefully) the end of this year. The question then is: can the IVOA (through its Semantics WG) have documents based on this W3C format that are in a higher stage than the W3C document describing the format?

We ask the advise of the EXEC on this point.

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VOEvent

Major prototyping work now is bringing in new event providers to the IVOA standard, and building scientifically useful tools, in order to show proper directions for future standards. Work in Trieste will involve digital signatures for VOEvents, registration of event streams and event stream repositories, standard vocabularies, extension schemas, and forming the VOEvent 2.0 standard.

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VOQL WG

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VOTable WG

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Astro-RG IG

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Data Curation and Preservation IG

The Data Curation and Preservation Interest Group intends to prepare a white paper describing the possible roles of the IVOA and its member projects in data curation and preservation initiatives. We intend to discuss the contents of the white paper in more detail at the May 2008 Interop in Trieste. We will also discuss DC&P efforts that are in progress in astronomy and related fields and how national and international standards efforts such as TRAC (http://www.crl.edu/PDF/trac.pdf) impact VO data providers.

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Theory IG

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-- NicholasWalton - 14 Jan 2008