IVOA Executive Committee Meeting (FM40)

Sunday May 15 @ 17.00-19:00 CET

Supplementary: Wednesday May 18 @ 13:00-14.30

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Logistics

Sunday meeting at the Osservatorio Astronomico di Capodimonte, Via Moiariello 16 Napoli (best way to get there is by taxi)

Wednesday meeting in room TBD at the Interop venue

DRAFT Agenda FM40

1. Roll Call and Agenda (MA)
2. Minutes of TM39 (PP)
3. Review of Actions
4. Project Reports - Significant Events Only
5. Report of the TCG meeting and TCG status (CA)
6. Reports by WGs - WG Chairs
7. Approval of new IVOA Recommendation(s) [Standing Item]
8. Expiring WG Chairs and vice-Chairs
9. ESO and the VO (FC)
10. CSP review (DDY)
11. Argentina VO (NOVA) status (PT)
12. Australia-VO status (AW)
13. Brasilian VO (BRAVO) status (AC)
14. Large projects and the IVOA (PP, all)
15. Possible new IVOA members (PP)
16. October 2011 Interop (AK)
17. Future Interops (All)
18. Date of next meeting
19. AOB
20. Summary of Actions (MA)

Reports from the Projects

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Argentina - NOVA

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ArVO

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AstroGrid

No significant update from last time. AstroGrid is no longer funded as an STFC line item, but the code, services and tools remain in use, and many members of the team continue to work on VO related EU or STFC funded projects (VOICE, VAMDC, Topcat) or undertaking VO duties as part of facility and data centre work (VISTA, ALMA, SDO, Gaia). We are exploring methods to formalise the currently loose sense of continuing consortium connections; this may continue the AstroGrid name, or may opt for a deliberate re-branding.

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Australia-VO

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BRAVO

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China-VO

Robotic Autonomous Observatory (RAO) Network is determined as a cornerstone research field of the China-VO. The primary research field is astronomical archive and data sharing. Based on strong requirements for RAO from the domestic astronomical community, our years of experiences on astronomical databases, and strong links between VO and the RAO, we make the decision to take the responsibility to provide RAO solution and support for Chinese astronomers, educators and amateur astronomers. A trigger team is set up under the name China-RAON.

WWT Teachers Training 2011 is under preparation, which will be held on the grassland in Inner-Mongolia from July 22 to 26. The first training was organized in 2010 very successfully. Due to the limited manpower, one principle for VO projects’ education and public outreach should be training the educators. This is important for scaling up our effort in promoting new way of teaching and learning.

A proposal is submitted to the NSF China to develop Astronomical Data Manager (ADM, previously named FITS Manager), a tool to provide individual astronomers an efficient management and utilization of their local data, bringing VO to astronomers in a seamless and transparent way. Final result will be available in the 3rd quarter of the year.

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CVO

AP services and put effort into optimising spatial joins for several common ways of providing input coordinates and writing queries. The size of uploaded tables is currently limited until we can resolve a scalability issue. The code to support uploads is part of the OpenCADC source code project.

The CADC has deployed operational VOSpace 2.0, CDP (Credential Delegation Protocol), and GMS (Group Membership Service) services to support data sharing and collaboration. The response from the community has been very positive despite the learning curve involved in IVOA SSO (X.509 certficates), credential delegation, and VOSpace itself.

The CADC is also providing cloud computing services to users, allowing them to maintain their own virtual machines and run then on various grid systems that support virtualisation. It remains unclear how much of this would be valuable as a future IVOA standard.

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Euro-VO

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ESO-VO

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ESAVO

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France VO

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GAVO

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HVO

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Japan-VO

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VAO

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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

SAMP: At Nara a presentation was made of the "Web Profile", a hub interface suitable for browser-based SAMP clients, which cannot easily use SAMP in its existing form. This would enable web applications to participate in SAMP communications in the same way that desktop tools can. There was agreement that this should be pursued with a view to absorbing it into the SAMP standard, though some outstanding issues about security were noted.

A new Working Draft has just been released (WD-SAMP-1.3-20110512) incorporating the Web Profile. Implementations exist for most aspects of this document. We will discuss this draft at this meeting, and in particular we will attempt to reach agreement on the security issues. If this is successful, we hope to move towards Recommendation status for SAMP 1.3 in the second half of 2011.

Application Registration: We are in the early stages of dicussions of how VO users do discovery of applications and services, in the SAMP context in particular, but also more generally. E.g., we may want some kind of Apps store. This certainly involves the Registry group and may ultimately involve GWS as well.

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Data Access Layer WG

We are nearing the end of the RFC period for SSA-1.1 (a minor revision) with no issues raised. This standard will be brought to the executive for approval in the near future.

Current work to be discussed at the Naples Interop include:

TAPRegExt-1.0 A working draft has been circulated within the WG and will be reviewed during the interop.

DALI-1.0 No progress since the last interop, but this will be actively discussed.

PQL-1.0 No progress, but this will be actively discussed.

SSA-1.2 Now that work on SSA-1.1 is complete and work on SpectrumDM-1.2 is well underway, this important part of the SED use cases from the science priorities committee can proceed.

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Data Models WG

• Photometry modeling :

WD-PhotDMv0.3 issued and discussed in the Working group. To discuss during this Interop: how to bring together complementary documents: PhotDMv0.3 , Spectrum1.2, and SED DM.

S. Derriere issued a new version for "Note on serializing photometric data measurements in VOTable" using the PhotDM concepts for source catalogs.

• SpectrumDM
• v1.1 :updates for alignment with SSA v1.1: done. Short RFC (15 days ) started on May 4.

• v1.2 : draft issued in January by Jonathan McDowell
  • expands Spectrum1.1
  • contains Photometry metadata re-used from the note on Photometry point and the photometric calibration defined in PhotDM
  • contains TimeSeries examples circulated on the DM list

• ObsCore DM v1.0

Proposed recommendation started 03rd of May and published on DAL/DM. Implementations going on at CADC, with lessons learned to be discussed at this interop.

• Characterisation DM v2.0 Working draft currently edited. This document expands previous version of CharDM and define support for:
  • polarised data,
  • Redshift axis
  • variability along the characterisation axes (level4)
  • composed data

• Utypes Note

Still pending- currently needed to publish new DM and their Utype list. Summary of current usage and definition rules at DM3 (M.Louys) and possibly discussion in splinter meetings.

• Simulation DM :

Proposed Recommendation issued on May 3 and currently discussed. Implementation Note to finalise.

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Grid and Web Services Working Group

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Registry WG

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Semantics/UCD WG

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VOEvent

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VOTable WG

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Data Curation and Preservation IG

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Knowledge Discovery in Databases IG

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Theory IG

* The RFC period for the Simulation Data Model (http://www.ivoa.net/cgi-bin/twiki/bin/viewauth/IVOA/SimRFC/PR-SimulationDataModel-v.1.00-20110428.pdf) has been opened on May 4th by DM Chair, after updates and modifications according to comments on the TIG and DM lists in March-April.

* Discussions on SimDAL, including the TAP implementation, and the SimDB proposal will be resumed at the next INTEROP. These are the main and urgent efforts for the future since SimDM is close to recommendation.