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IVOA Executive Committee Meeting (FM30)

Sunday Oct 26 2008 @ 16.00-18.00 GMT

Contents

Logistics

Full Meeting at InterOpOct2008: STScI Cafeteria Conference room

STScI building, 3700 San Martin Drive, across the street from the JHU Physics Department (Bloomberg building). Being a Sunday the Institute will be locked, but there is a guard at the front desk who will let you in. They will be aware of the meeting and can direct you to the Cafeteria Conference Room. To get to the "CafCon" you enter the STScI lobby, go to your right beyond the doors to the auditorium, down the hall into the cafeteria, and cross the cafeteria to the far side at the right. There is a short corridor and just off that corridor you will find the CafCon on your left.

Agenda

Final - 20081019

Roll Call and Agenda NW
Minutes of TM 29
Project Reports Significant Events Only
Review of Action Items NW
Approval of New IVOA Recommendations Standing Item
Notes from the LOC – BH
WG and IG Updates CA
TCG Status and Review of Roadmap – CA
Informal/Exec Committees DDY
- Liaison Group - DDY
- Take Up Group - DDY
- Report of IVOA Newsletter – MA, DDY
Prospective New Members – Update – DDY
Report of Standards Committee – FG
Spring 2009 Interop Venue and Planning - DDY, FG
Autumn 2009 Interop Venue and Planning
Date of Next Exec Meeting
AOB
Review of New Action Items

Reports from the Projects

ArVO

AstroGrid

AstroGrid recently made two significant releases recently. First there was a public release of the main component of our user software suite, VODesktop 1.2.0. There are no very major changes, but a number of minor improvements and bug fixes. This is available as usual at http://www.astrogrid.org The second significant release was of the background software, AstroGrid 2008.2 This release is intended for data centre staff, third party developers, and of course other VO projects. It is available at a separate website, http://deployer.astrogrid.org (Kept carefully away from end users...) The deployer website has much less explanation than the end-user website, but our intention is to gradually make this much easier to use.

Meanwhile, as you all know, we have been the victim of STFC funding problems. Our current funding was for the calendar years 2008-9, with the expectation that we would apply for longer term operational funding during 2009. Unfortunately the STFC programmatic review resulted in a decision to close this funding early. (Despite the best efforts of many of our IVOA colleagues in the consultation period !). We have completed negotiations with STFC officials, and the AG3 funding will ramp down during 2009 until finishing by June.

The minimalist situation is that by June we will "shrink wrap" the AstroGrid software product, i.e. complete, robustify, and document the current components, so that this software is as useful as possible to others. Meanwhile, the operating services (Registry, VOSpace etc) will be kept running as long as possible on a best efforts basis by the current consortium, so that users can continue getting value.

However we are of course actively pursuing continued funding for VO-related activity. Following discussions with STFC officials, this will have a distinct change of focus, and will be focused explicitly on the needs of facilities, and on European integration. The new project will be called "VOTC:UK". It is not AstroGrid. But it uses the AstroGrid product and builds on it. We held a meeting in September with representatives from many UK facilities, missions, and data centres, which was extremely positive. A "Statement of Interest" will be submitted by November, with a proposal to follow on soon after.

Australia-VO

China-VO

CVO - Canada

Euro-VO

As part of the EURO-VO AIDA project, a workshop "Multiwavelength Astronomy and the VO" will be organized at ESAC on 01-03 December 2008.

Seven proposals were submitted to the first EuroVO-AIDA research initiative, aimed at science projects that could benefit from the VO concept. These were evaluated by the EURO-VO Science Advisory Committee (SAC) and by EURO-VO staff, who also provided a technical assessment. This was done also by inviting the PIs to a one-day workshop in September at ESO. Four teams were selected and these will now receive EURO-VO support to carry out their projects.

France VO

GAVO - Germany

HVO - Hungary

Japan-VO

Korean VO

NVO - USA

RVO - Russia

SVO - Spain

VO-India

VObs.it - Italy

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

Following final discussions at the Trieste Interop, work has been completed on the VOSpace 1.1 and Credential Delegation Protocol specifications over the summer and these have been released as Proposed Recommendations. They are both currently now in their RFC periods. There were some versioning issues with the VOSpace specification which highlighted a weakness in the existing Standards and Documents process but this is hopefully addressed in the revised process.

New Working Drafts of the VOSI and UWS specifications have also been released and these will hopefully be promoted to PR status following this meeting. The WS Basic Profile specification was also finally released as a proper IVOA Working Draft but dependencies on VOSI have been identified and these two - WS Basic Profile and VOSI - will now be kept in step.

Starting with this meeting, we will be moving onto VOSpace 2.0 - the RESTful version - and authorization. We are revisiting logging and continuing to look at alternate security mechanisms, driven by industry practices. We will also be considering whether we need to define "web service friendly" versions of VO standards, such as VOTable, and should we be recommending a particular set of software libraries for implementors.

Registry WG

Semantics/UCD WG

VOEvent

Activities since Trieste have focused on discussions and preparations for VOEvent v2.0. Intent is to move this to proposed recommendation stage in coordination with the VOEvent IV workshop at UCSC at the end of April 2009.

VOEvent v2.0 will include support for the representation of time series and orbital elements, for improved references to external URIs of various types, for explicitly referencing external schemata in support of non-native event streams, and for a controlled vocabular(ies) based on the excellent work of the semantics WG. In addition, the WG is investigating different options for authentication via digital signing technologies.

As separate initiatives that will likely result in distinct proposed recommendations, the WG is discussing the Simple Event Access Protocol (SEAP) and Registry support for servers serving streams of scientifically related VOEvent packets. These efforts are not currently scheduled, but one would anticipate significant progress over roughly the next year.

The VOEvent WG continues to pursue collaboration with several extra-IVOA entities, particularly including the internationally sited Heterogeneous Telescope Networks (HTN) consortium and NASA's Gamma-ray bursts Coordinates Network (GCN). We are aggressively pursuing additional event streams, for instance, events resulting from the upcoming Dark Energy Survey to be conducted with the very wide field DECam at the CTIO 4m Blanco telescope.

In addition to VOEvent sessions and joint sessions at the Baltimore Interop, WG personnel will be presenting at the ADASS Sky/WWT tutorial and at the ADASS BOF, "Architectures for Time Domain Astronomy". Several ADASS contributions derive from VOEvent technologies and projects.