IVOA Executive Committee Meeting (FM66)

FM66 - Thu, 20 Oct 2016 - 14:00 CEST

Contents

• IVOA Executive Committee Meeting (FM66)
  • 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
    • USVOA
    • RVO
    • SA^3
    • SVO
    • VO-India
  • Report from the TCG
  • Reports from the WGs

Logistics

Thursday, Oct 20, 2016 @14:00 CEST

Agenda FM66

(IVOA Exec only)

1. Roll Call and Agenda (JE)
2. Minutes of TM65
3. Review of Actions
4. Project Reports [Significant Events Only]
5. Report from the WG/IG
6. Overall TCG status
7. Approval of new IVOA Recommendation(s) [Standing Item]
8. Non-responding Registry entries
9. IVOA Newsletter editorial/social media team renewal
10. Renewal of the IVOA Chair and vice-Chair
11. Update on Northern Spring 2017 - Shanghai ()
12. Future Interop
    • Northern Spring 2017 - Shanghai, China (May 14-19)
    • Northern Automn 2017 - Santiago, Chile (Oct 27-29)
13. Date of Next Exec Meeting
14. AOB
15. Review of Action Items

The following position are due Northern Autumn 2016 meeting:

• Executive Committee Chair and vice Chair
• Theory Interest Group vice Chair (still vacant)

ArVO

AstroGrid

Australia-VO

The main IVOA related activities are continuing developments of the CASDA archive interfaces and implementations of IVOA standard protocols. The other activity is related to the homogenisation of the AAO data holdings, which also includes the implementation of IVOA interfaces. The First data release of the MWA GLEAM survey will be announced this week and the access is also supporting VO standard protocols. Recently a call for expression of interests has been released to propose projects in the area of eResearch in astronomy which also opens new opportunities to fund VO related activities, which are specifically mentioned in the call.

BRAVO

China-VO

Aliyun becomes strategic partner of the China-VO

On 13 Oct., Yan Jun (Director of National Astronomical Observatory of China, NAOC) and Hu Xiaoming (President of Aliyun Cloud Computing Co., Ltd.) announced the news in the 2016 Computing Conference hold in Hangzhou (https://yunqi.aliyun.com/). Aliyun is the largest public Cloud computing service provider in China, and the No. 3 in the world.

As strategic partners, NAOC and Aliyun is planning to establish “NAOC-Aliyun Astronomical Big Data Joint Research Center”. Chinese Virtual Observatory (China-VO) will be immigrated onto Aliyun platform to enhance its capability as a full lifecycle data management and open access environment.

ChiVO

CVO

Euro_VO

ESAVO

France VO

GAVO

The GAVO Data Centers in Heidelberg and Potsdam keep maintaining and developing services. Notable additions include the catalogs from Gaia DR1, a Gaia-based ephemeris service, scanned plates from Boyden station, the RAVE DR5, and a prototype for VOTT, a nicely formatted excerpt of the Registry showing tutorial-like material for the VO.

In software, in addition to the usual slew of bug fixes and minor improvements, we added to DaCHS a built-in citation advice (including BibTeX generation), as well as tentative VOResource 1.1 support, updates of the EPN-TAP infrastructure to EPN-TAP 2.0 and of obscore to 1.1, and we added a SIAv2 endpoint next to obscore. DaCHS is now in release 0.9.7. We also resumed development of pyVO, adding a TAP client as presented during ADASS.

In standards, we were fairly busy forging consensus on various different issues to be solved before VOResource 1.1 (with support for DOIs and ORCIDs) can go ahead. We also worked on getting EPN-TAP 2.0 ready for publication.

Finally, GAVO cooperated with ASTERICS to make the European Data Provider Forum a success, bringing together about 50 participants from various European data centers to discuss challenges and solutions in astronomical data publication.

HVO

VObs.it

Japan-VO

RVO

SA^3

SVO

Ukraine_VO

USVOA

NAVO:

Within a few days of its release by ESA, IRSA has integrated the Gaia DR1 release into its holdings including its VO interfaces. Through these, this major new dataset can be accessed directly at IRSA or through MAST's Portal, the HEASARC's Xamin, and other VO-enabled tools. All of IRSA's hundreds of tables are visible through the VO -- including the new Gaia tables -- and are now marked in the VO registry as accessible through their general table access protocol interface.

NED plans an October release of a complete version 2 image access service to NED's holdings allowing for data selection by position, name, spectral regime, resolution and other criteria.

In our NAVO indexing study, IPAC and STScI have each benchmarked a million spatial queries against the 2MASS All Sky Point Source Catalog. This table had been loaded into PostgreSQL databases set up at their institutions. Both sites have tested multiple geometrical indexing schemes. Early results suggest that the differences due to the geometry choices were small but there were significant differences seen due to the hardware/operating systems/networks tested at the two sites.

NRAO:

VO-India

Report from the TCG

Report from the WGs

Registry

The biggest chunk of work in Registry continues to be VOResource 1.1, with fruitful discussions on the mailing list on topics like natural language in the Registry, representation of mirror sites, or vocabularies. The main point, the inclusion of external identifier schemes (DOIs, ORCIDs), appears uncontentious. We hope to be able to work out the remaining open issues during the Trieste interop and in the rest of 2016 and aim for PR in January.

For table registration, several data centers have adopted the technique suggested in the note published in January, which we will put on track for endorsement as soon as DocStd 2.0 is adopted. However, some important data providers have not yet published the auiliary records, so we still are not ready to move from GloTS to the proper registry for TAP table discovery.

SimpleDALRegExt 1.1 is essentially ready for REC, with just one WG review missing.

Registry Interfaces 1.1 is ready for PR; as a reminder, this is about deprecating the old, SOAP-based search interface and anchoring the RofR in our standards.

Still on the back burner: Spatial searches (pending pgsphere developments), VOEvent, HiPS, VOSpace registry extensions (pending WG input).