IVOA Executive Committee Meeting (TM124)
Date: Thursday, November 14, 2024
Time: 16:30 CET (Valletta, Malta local time) / 15:30 UTC
Physical Location: University of Malta, Valletta campus, Institute of Space Sciences and Astronomy, Room 103
Virtual: Zoom (
https://aao.zoom.us/j/84831315252?pwd=TjJZb0VBRVgxcDZ1cVVqTENZMWNMZz09; passcode: 581668)
Contents
Agenda
- Roll call and agenda
- Review and approval of TM123 Minutes
- Review of ACTIONS_for_TM124.pdf
- Report on the IAU General Assembly
- Project Reports [Significant Events Only]
- Overall TCG Status [Standing Item]
- High Energy Interest Group (HEIG) proposal
- Approval of new IVOA Recommendation(s) [Standing Item]
- CSP Status
- P3T Report
- IVOA Website [New Standing Item]
- Proposal to use the IVOA newsletter to recruit a volunteer(s) to coordinate feedback and improvements on the IVOA website.
- Draft new website available: https://webtest.ivoa.info/
- Future Interop meetings
- Northern Spring 2025 - Maryland, USA
- Northern Fall 2025
- Date of next Exec meeting
- AOB
- Review of new actions
Reports from the Projects
NOVA (Argentina)
ArVO (Armenia)
ASVO (Australia)
Data Central has published two major data releases:
- GALAH Data Release 4, including 17 million AAT spectra and associated catalogues
- GLEAM-X Data Release 2, including ~13,000 sq degrees of multi-frequency imaging and associated catalogues
We are also building records for the Data Central TAP service to be included in the IVOA registry.
BRAVO (Brazil)
China-VO
CVO (Canada)
ESA (Europe)
ESASky version 7.0 released early November containing an interactive Time-Series Viewer for detailed inspection of public time-series data from Gaia DR3 epoch photometry, XMM-Newton EPIC photometry and XMM-Newton OM photometry. This release also contains the latest version of the XMM-OM serendipitous ultraviolet source survey catalogue (XMM-SUSS6.2) and an upgrade to the latest Aladin Lite sky visualisation (from CDS), which contains support to FITS
HiPS, integrated FITS controls within the skies panel (e.g. changing the sky stretch, cuts and blending) and new sky projections (e.g. Spheric, Tangential, Aitoff, Mollweide…).
Euclid Archive Internal Quick Release #1on 6th of November 2024, featuring lots of VO standards (TAP, SIAP, SSAP, VOSpace, SODA, DataLink)
Euclid QR#1 contains data for a limited sky coverage 50 deg2 with exclusive-access data to the Euclid Consortium and the Euclid interdisciplinary scientists and their teams to get familiarized with Euclid data and capabilities. It also included a subset of the Euclid scientific data products (no cosmological analysis). QR1 data will be released publicly in March 2025 and the 1
st major public Euclid data released scheduled for the second half of 2026. Within one week after the release, the VO data services were heavily used:
- 40.136 TAP Sync requests
- 22.329 TAP Async requests
- 8.170 SIAP requests
- 10.040 Cutout requests
- 18.637 Download requests of FITS files
The best release of the Integral Science Legacy Archive (ISLA) was released in October 2024, and is based on the usual TAP backend, as all the ESA Science Archives.
Euro-VO (Europe)
Euro-VO activities have gained some new funding for a project called Astro-CC Pilot (Astronomy Open Science Competence Centre Pilot). This project will run for 2 years December 2024 - November 2026, and is focused on running community events: 2 Science with VO Schools, 2 Technology forums, and a "Data Provider forum".
GAVO (Germany)
GAVO's Heidelberg data centre keeps adding resources at a rate of a few per semester; a particularly notable addition was an obscore mapping of DASCH
https://blog.g-vo.org/dasch-is-now-in-the-vo.html.
We maintain and support our data publication package
DaCHS. Notable improvements since the last interop include preliminary support for the persistent TAP uploads
https://blog.g-vo.org/a-proposal-for-persistent-tap-uploads.html and a prototype for
VODataService 's proposed productTypeServed as well as registering Obscore tables in their own records (
https://blog.g-vo.org/what-s-new-in-dachs-2-10.html).
We also participate in the development of pyVO. Its version 1.6 now has our new API for global image discovery
https://blog.g-vo.org/global-dataset-discovery-in-pyvo.html.
In teaching and outreach, we have given a lecture on using the VO with particular attention on
ADQL and pyVO:
https://blog.g-vo.org/learn-to-use-the-vo.html. The resulting lecture notes hopefully work as something like a textbook, and re-use by other projects is of course highly welcome.
JVO (Japan)
Kazakhstan VO
NLVO (Netherlands)
OV-France
* VESPA
- End of contract Europlanet RI in July 2024
- New website https://vespa.obspm.fr
- 91 published services EPN-TAP
- 69 HiPS on planetary sciences
- Geospatial portal under development in collaboration with the CDS (AladinLite)
- Interface EPN-TAP for PDS4 data collections (NASA/ESA/JAXA)
- Shape models of small bodies can now be visualised on Topcat!
* CDS
- CDS participation in SKA SRCNet prototyping: implementation of VO standards based on SRCNet needs (HiPS, ObsCore, SODA, Aladin Lite)
- New web pages https://cds.unistra.fr
- Jupyter notebooks available for each VizieR catalogue! (pyvo, mocpy, ipyaladin)
- CDS “Open Data for Astronomy” project funded: ObsCore for ‘associated data’ from journals
- ipyaladin improved compatibility with Astropy, supports MOC, supports FITS, …)
- mocpy: faster methods (from_cones, from_boxes), new methods (MOC from Astropy regions,…). Collaboration with various research groups (Goddard, LINCC, LIGO)
RVO (Russia)
SA^3 (South Africa)
SKAO (Square Kilometre Array Observatory; Australia & South Africa)
SVO (Spain)
USVOA (United States)
The USVOA continues to actively support IVOA developments and meetings.
The Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian Chandra team has been particularly active in the debate of high energy astrophysics standards and is one of the leading proponents of the establishment of a working group in this area.
NOIRLab implemented and deployed a first version of a light-weight VO Publishing Registry, with services from the Astro Data Lab science platform exposed in this iteration.
VO-India
VObs.it (Italy)
Report from the TCG
Report from the CSP