IVOA Executive Committee Meeting (TM35)

*Tues Mar 2 2010 @ 16.00 GMT

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Logistics

Telecon:

Agenda

1. Roll Call and Agenda (MA)
2. Minutes of FM34 Suppl., Minutes of FM34 (FP)
3. Review of Actions (MA)
4. Project Reports - Significant Events Only
5. TCG status (CA)
6. Approval of new IVOA Recommendation(s) [Standing Item]
7. Expired/expiring Chairs (all)
8. Program Organising Committee (SG)
9. Standing Committee on Science Priorities (DDY)
10. Proposal for IG on Data Mining (KDD-IG) (FP)
11. ObsTAP project (DS)
12. Educational aspects - regional experiences (all)
13. Inclusion of new data in the VO - national strategies (all)
14. Mailing lists (FP)
15. Future Interops (DS/MO)
16. AOB
17. Date of Next Exec Meeting
18. Review of New Action Items (MA)

Reports from the Projects

ArVO

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AstroGrid

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Australia-VO

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BraVO

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China-VO

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CVO

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Euro-VO

The first meeting of the (mostly) renewed Euro-VO Science Advisory Committee (SAC) took place on Dec. 14, 2009, at ESO. The SAC is composed of leading European researchers outside mainstream VO projects (see http://www.euro-vo.org/pub/fc/sac.html). SAC members were briefed on recent Euro-VO activities and provided scientific input to the project. The next SAC meeting will be at Imperial College in June.

The second European “hands-on” VO School was held at CDS, Strasbourg, Jan. 25 - 28, 2010 as part of the activities of the Euro-VO AIDA project (see http://cds.u-strasbg.fr/aidahandson2010/). The aim of the school, targeted mostly at PhD students and young post-docs, was to expose European astronomers to the many available VO tools and services so that they could be used efficiently for research purposes. The school involved 39 students, out of the 79 who requested to participate, and 13 tutors and tool developers. Based on the input received from the participants during the hands-on and feedback sessions, and gathered from the feedback form, the school was a great success.

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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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Korean VO

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NVO

The US VO project remains stalled as we await NSF funding. There has been some progress, however, in recent weeks, and it would seem that release of funds is imminent. Of course, we have had this impression a number of times in the past.

In the interim we are proceeding, using NASA funds already in hand, to maintain our core services and run regular testing of aliveness and compliance of VO services. We are also going ahead and convening the VAO Science Council, the group that will advise us on science priorities. The Council will meet at NASA Goddard on March 26-27. We are preparing presentations describing possible development activities in seven areas: 1) a cross-matched "master catalog" and advance cross-matching tools for users, 2) support for rapid transients, 3) much more extensive linking between data and publications, 4) robust data discovery and data mining, 5) a extended set of VO-enabled tools, including visualization, 6) integration of theoretical simulations and simulated observations, and 7) development of a "seamless" astronomical research environment.

The members of the Science Council are drawn from the US astronomical community and represent a variety of types of organizations and research interests. Several members have long-term connections to the VO, but most are from outside the VO project and we hope will bring a fresh perspective.

Pepi Fabbiano, chair, SAO
Daniela Calzetti, U.Mass.
Chris Carilli, NRAO
Zeljko Ivezic, U. Wash.
Eric Feigelson, Penn State
Paul Eskridge, Minn.State
Sarah Seager, MIT
Alyssa Goodman, Harvard
George Djorgovski, Caltech
Marc Postman, STScI
Barry Madore, Carnegie

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RVO

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SVO

Manpower: 10 FTEs. The SVO Thematic Network (people from Spanish institutes with interest in the VO) is composed of 112 members in 28 institutes.

Standards: Work on access protocols and models for theoretical data is progressing. Information on this topic can be found at: http://svo.cab.inta-csic.es/modules.php?op=modload&name=phpWiki&file=index&pagename=Projects-Theory

VO archives: - Technical support for the development of a VO archive for a robotic telescope (in collab. with the University of Barcelona)

VO Science:

- "GTC/OSIRIS Spectroscopic Identification of a Faint L Subdwarf in the UKIRT Infrared Deep Sky Survey". (Lodieu et al. 2010ApJ...708L.107L)

- Scientific support to the discovery of hot subdwarfs using VO tools.

Outreach:

- "The Virtual Observatory for the amateur astronomy". Pro-Am workshop. Cordoba, Nov 2009. José M. Alacid, Enrique Solano.

- Aladin: Translation into Spanish (in the framework of EuroVO-AIDA)

- Use cases: Translation into Spanish (in the framework of EuroVO-AIDA)

Education:

- Euro-VO AIDA School. Strasbourg. January 2010. Two SVO members in the Scientific and Technical Organizing Committee (STOC)

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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

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Data Access Layer WG

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Data Models WG

• Core Components Observation Data Model

The goal of this effort is to provide a consistent and concise description of the minimal set of metadata for observations necessary to perform data discovery. The targeted implementation platform is a TAP/ADQL service that should be manageable to be installed by most archive services without too much re-engineering cost. This effort has two collaborative aspects: a conceptual one, that should provide a logical and extensible model, and a pragmatic engineering aspect that focuses on a strategy for the integration of existing data collection, stored in existing DB. A draft document is currently being elaborated the first version of which is published at http://www.ivoa.net/internal/IVOA/ObsDMCoreComponents/WD-ObsCoreDM-0.1-2010Jan15.pdf.zip A first implementation is available from CADC and will be described in the IVOA Observation Core Components Data Model working draft.

• Full Observation, Provenance and Extended Characterisation Data Model

This topic explores the specific use-cases where observations need more levels of detail to be fully described

1. Uses-cases for complex data sets (CCD mosaics, polarised data ) XML description examples of polarized or composed observations (F. Bonnarel, A.Richards)
2. Examples for resolution variation and variable PSF in observations by Igor Chilingarian and F.Bonnarel
3. Collaboration on Provenance data model started during Garching interop meeting (J.deSantander, A.Delgado, N.Delmotte, M.Louys, I.Chilingarian, Bonnarel)
4. A note on Polarization model and data access has been written by A.Richards with collaboration of F.Bonnarel.

• Characterisation data model in practice for in science applications

The CDS, mainly Gregory Mantelet a young engineer trainee (with inputs from C.Bot, P.Fernique, F.Bonnarel) has developped a java plugin for the sky browser application Aladin. This plugin creates spectral energy distributions (SEDs) from multi-band photometrically calibrated images loaded in the Aladin application. It relies on metadata from the "Characterisation data model" mainly a spatial region, the central wavelength, as well as the flux units. The plugin supports data conversions in order to deal with heterogeneous image sets, but also for displays. For example, fluxes (in various astronomical units) can be converted into intensities or energies (in various units as well). Wavelength to frequency conversions are another example. This plugin is fully VO interoperable as it supports the SAMP protocol and delivers SEDs in all VO formats: VOTable, XML schema.

• Photometry Datamodel

Use-cases have been collected during the Garching interop and summarized in the following document by M.Louys, with the help of P.Padovani and D. Schade): http://www.ivoa.net/cgi-bin/twiki/bin/view/IVOA/PhotometryDataModel

Discussions are currently taking place (ESAC, SVO, CDS) for a bottom-up approach for the representation of SEDs .The Photometry DM presented in Garching and SSA/SpectrumDM are re-used.

• Utypes and Units

These IVOA notes updates are currently idle tasks due to lack of participation/manpower.

• Miscellaneous

Another pending task is the concurent update of two previous documents: SSA and Spectrum where Utypes and ucds show some mismatches.

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Grid and Web Services Working Group

Unfortunately lack of dedicated resource, i.e. more than just when I have a few minutes spare, has meant that the planned activities for this recent period have been fairly curtailed. However, we have still managed to complete the final edit of Credential Delegation Protocol and start the TCG review period of Universal Worker Service (UWS). It is hoped that VOSI (to PR this week) and WS-I (went to PR 1/3/10) will have their RFCs announced soon and we can then focus on VOSpace 2.0 development.

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Registry WG

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Semantics/UCD WG

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VOEvent

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VOQL WG

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VOTable WG

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Data Curation and Preservation IG

The DCP IG has basically been inactive for the past year, but DCP activities are now getting under way such that we can expect the IG to regroup. In the US, NSF's DataNet program has now funded two projects, DataOne and the Data Conservancy. The latter is lead by Johns Hopkins University and has a direct NVO/VAO connection.

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Theory IG