IVOA Executive Committee Meeting (FM53)

Sunday, May 18, 2014 (16:00 - 18:00)

Contents

• IVOA Executive Committee Meeting (TM52)
  • Logistics
  • Agenda
  • Reports from the Projects
    • Argentina - NOVA
    • ArVO
    • AstroGrid
    • Australia-VO
    • BRAVO
    • China-VO
    • ChiVO
    • CVO
    • Euro-VO
    • ESAVO
    • France VO
    • GAVO
    • HVO
    • VObs.it
    • Japan-VO
    • Ukraine VO
    • VAO
    • RVO
    • SA^3
    • SVO
    • VO-India

Logistics

Sunday, May 18, 2014 (16:00-18:00) Hotel NH Principe de Vergara

Agenda

1. Roll Call and Agenda (JE)
2. Minutes of TM52
3. Review of Actions
4. Project Reports [Significant Events Only]
5. TCG status
6. Approval of new IVOA Recommendation(s) [Standing Item]
7. Review expiring Working Group Chair/Deputy Chair positions
8. IVOA Web Page and Document Repository transfer
9. Status of VO efforts in the US post-VAO
10. Date of Next Exec Meeting
11. AOB
12. Review of Action Items (JE)

Reports from the Projects

Argentina - NOVA

ArVO

AstroGrid

Australia-VO

BRAVO

China-VO

ChiVO

CVO

Euro-VO

ESAVO

France VO

GAVO

HVO

VObs.it

Japan-VO

Ukraine VO

VAO

The VAO has focused its activities on executing the VAO Project Execution Plan (PEP) for the period May 1, 2013 and through September 30, 2014, approved on June 8, 2013. Briefly, the plan calls for completion of all deliverables already underway, continued monitoring of services, preparation to deliver VAO assets to the community and delivery of a protocol and data discovery and data access service for multi-dimensional data sets.

The VAO hosted the semi-annual interoperability workshop in Waikoloa, HI, consecutively with the annual ADASS conference, and has developed an agenda for the VAO close-out review, scheduled for July 10 and 11, 2014 in Pasadena, CA, and stakeholders in the project have been invited to attend. VAO management consulted with NASA archive staff to support their proposal to sustain the VAO infrastructure.

VAO staff has been active in the community: they have made presentations at conferences, and have participated on panel discussions and workshops. VAO staff holds leadership roles in the IVOA, and have contributed to the development of five IVOA standards. VAO personnel have also been active in the Research Data Alliance (RDA), an international initiative to foster data access and exchange throughout the research community.

The final versions of the Data Discovery tool, Iris (the Spectral Energy Distribution service) and the Cross-comparison service have been delivered. These releases offer new functionality for users and correct several defects that have been reported. The new releases include updated user documentation and video tutorials.

Repositories have been set up to host the VAO code base and documentation with Google’s free cloud-based services. The code repository has been populated with essentially all versions of software components delivered to date, and new components are transferred there each month as they are delivered. The documentation repository has been populated with user guides and tutorials, project reports, professional outreach materials, and a list of technical publications and presentations by team members.

The VAO has begun the transfer of IVOA communication assets (web site, wiki and mailing lists) to VOIndia and VOItaly. The VAO Program Manager is coordinating these efforts on behalf of the IVOA Executive Council.

VO science services were available 98% of the time, even with the shutdown of the federal government. The VAO validation services detected a dramatic decrease in validation statistics, which was attributed to changes in Vizier data services. The VAO informed Vizier staff and the problem was corrected. VO infrastructure requests remained steady during 2013 and early 2014, except for a surge in Registry queries in late 2103. Between March 30, 2013 and April 11, 2014, 327 tickets were filed with the JIRA ticket system and 245 were closed.

A major effort for the VAO is support for discovery of and access to multidimensional data sets (“data cubes’), identified as a key science initiative by the IVOA. The VAO has been providing leadership in this endeavor. A white paper delivered in May 2013 described the mechanisms and science drivers for serving data cubes, and led to the development of a prototype data access that served data from a range of projects. Concurrently, the VAO proposed modifications of existing standards and data models that were mandated by this service, and a successful demonstration at the Winter IVOA meeting led to agreement on the necessary requirements to support data cube. VAO staff is working with international partners to present mature versions of the Image Data Model, Simple Image Access Protocol v2, and DataLink at the Spring 2014 meeting.

The VAO established a partnership with the NRAO to support scalable access to the large datasets from ALMA and JVLA, and to support seamless access to their visualization toolkit, CASA. To date, the VAO has delivered an enhanced DALServer to provide access to data cubes, and NARO has integrated the VOClient tools into the CASA software.

The SciDrive data sharing and publication service has been made accessible to users for evaluation. It provides 100-TB storage with triple redundancy, and includes the Single Sign On service. Upgrades to the registry and data publishing tool are being readied for release.

A production release of the VOClient, which offers command line access to the VO, was deployed in January 2014, and two beta releases of the native Python package, PyVO, were released through the Astropy community-supported platform.

RVO

SA^3

SVO

VO-India