IVOA Executive Committee Meeting (TM43)

Tuesday February 07 @ 17.00 CET

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Logistics

Telecon

Agenda TM43

1. Roll Call and Agenda (MA)
2. Minutes of FM42 and FM42S
3. Review of Actions
4. Project Reports - Significant Events Only
5. Report of the TCG meeting and TCG status (CA)
6. Approval of new IVOA Recommendation(s) [Standing Item]
7. WG Chairs and vice-Chairs with expiring terms
8. May 2012 Interop
9. Future Interops (All)
10. CSP status (MA)
11. Date of next telecon
12. AOB
13. Summary of Actions (MA)

Reports from the Projects

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Argentina - NOVA

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ArVO

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AstroGrid

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Australia-VO

We are i the process of migrating and updating the aus-vo web appearance. The domains are now owned by Astronomy Australia Limited (AAL).

A study has been conducted by a consulting company to inform AAL about the needs of Australian Astronomy for federation of data sets. This study has been delivered and is currently being discussed.

AAL was successful in applying for a substantial federal grant to support work in the federation of data sets. More details to follow later this year.

ICRAR is currently implementing the front-end data flow for the Murchison Wide Field Array, including the databsae to support the final user interfaces, including the VO services.

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BRAVO

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China-VO

LAMOST pilot sky survey data was public released with VO supports in last November. Designed and developed by the China-VO, the data access platform supports VOTable outputs and limited VO DAL interfaces. Aladin, WWT and other VO compliant tools are recommended to LAMOST scientific users for cross-matching and analyzing.

China-VO became a partner of BOOTES (Burst Observer and Optical Transient Exploring System) project. Bootes-4, the fourth robotic autonomous observatory in the telescope network, was installed at Yunnan Astronomical Observatory, southwest of China. The construction and operation of the robotic observatory will provide nice opportunities to learn and test time-domain astronomy related technologies.

China-VO and Astroinformatics 2011 was held successfully from Nov. 9 to 13, 2011, which was the 10th anniversary VO workshop started from 2001. More than 70 participants attended the workshop. Prof. George Djorgovski and Dr. Yan Xu were invited to give lectures at the event.

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CVO

In our TAP service, we have implemented the WD-TAPRegExt-1.0 standard to describe service capabilities in more detail. We have also implemented some support for augmenting the VOTable column metadata when functions are used in the select list of queries, but this is a challenging and on-going problem. Source code to implement the VOSI-capabilities with TAPRegExt extension and to validate the XML document produced is part of the OpenCADC project at http://opencadc.googlecode.com/.

We are in the process of implementing our own publishing registry using the tools from the AstroGrid project. We should be in a position to take over the curation of holdings under the ivo://cadc.nrc.ca authority in the near future.

Our VOSpace-2.0 implementation is operational and supports collaborations for many project teams. The current holdings are roughly 6 million files (20TB), with roughly 10TB/week of traffic (1TB upload, 9TB download).

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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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Ukraine VO

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VAO

The quarter from October to December 2011 was period of both major accomplishment and major disappointment for the VAO. On the accomplishment side was bringing to release status all of the major science initiatives that were planned as part of the VAO Year 1 development, and releasing these for use by researchers in astronomy through a series of VAO Community Days, the ADASS Conference, a special session at the January 2012 AAS meeting in Austin, and an exhibit booth at the AAS meeting. Interest in using VAO tools is increasing in the community, as evidenced by a 20% growth in our e-mail list (to nearly 700 people). Verbal feedback during our interactions with astronomers was generally very positive. We are optimistic that take-up of VO tools will continue to grow, and we are fostering further engagement through a solicitation for science collaborations with individuals and research groups in the community.

The operational aspects of the VAO are deployed and stable. We routinely verify service aliveness and compliance with IVOA standards, and work with service providers to correct errors or deficiencies. Service reliability is good. We have a robust issue tracking system in place, a comprehensive code management system, and an excellent web page that provides easy access to software (both from the VAO and other VO projects worldwide), services, and documentation.

Our Education and Public Outreach group put in a tremendous effort to prepare an education-focused web site, a tutorial for high school, junior college, and college teachers, and other supporting materials for an afternoon special session at the Austin AAS meeting. The session illustrated the use of WorldWide Telescope as a teaching and exploration tool and included hands-on experience with laptop computers.

A revised version of the VAO Project Execution Plan, which responds to agency redirection for the VAO baseline, is nearly complete and will be submitted to the agencies shortly.

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RVO

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SVO

(Since October 2011)

Manpower: 10 FTEs (one less than in the previous report). The SVO Thematic Network (people from Spanish institutes with interest in the VO) is composed of almost 200 participants from more than 30 labs.

Web page: New design of the SVO official web page.

VO-compliance of astronomical archives:

- Official release of the GTC VO archive (http://gtc.sdc.cab.inta-csic.es/gtc/index.jsp)

VO Science:

- Identification of red high proper-motion objects in Tycho-2 and 2MASS catalogues using Virtual Observatory tools (Jiménez-Esteban, Caballero, et al. (includes Solano) http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2012arXiv1201.5315J

Applications:

- VOSED: a Virtual Observatory tool to build and analyze SEDs (Gutiérrez, Solano, et al.) http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2011hsa6.conf..776G

Outreach:

- The citizen-science project "Identification of Near Earth Asteroids using VO tools" (http://www.laeff.cab.inta-csic.es/projects/near/main/?&newlang=eng) is running smoothly: 3,000 registered users have made 120,000 measurements on 7,000 SDSS images.

- Oral presentation "The Virtual Observatory and the amateur community" (http://www.astrosabadell.org/html/pdf/en/programa-convencio2011.pdf)

Education:

- VO school (http://svo.cab.inta-csic.es/svoMeetings/index.php?mid=31&action=page&pagename=Meetings/RoPACS_VO_School/Presentation) in the framework of the RoPACS project (http://star.herts.ac.uk/RoPACS/)

- The Wikipedia pages on "Virtual Observatory" and "Spanish Virtual Observatory" have been updated (both in Spanish).

- The Virtual Observatory in the classroom (http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2011hsa6.conf..797A)

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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 v1.3 completed RFC period with one (minor, but interesting) comment. A small change to the text was made to accommodate it. Now in TCG review period, scheduled to complete 27 Feb 2012.

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Data Access Layer WG

PR-SSA-1.1 has copmpleted RFC review, TCG review, and been accepted by the IVOA Executive. The final REC document will be uploaded by 2010-02-10.

The WG review period for WD-TAPRegExt-1.0 has been completed and we are satisfied that the standard has been implemented and the document is complete. The RFC period will begin by 2012-02-10.

The latest revsion of WD-DALI-1.0 has been posted to the DAL-WG for comment. We hope to begin WG review soon and the RFC on schedule near 2012-02-28.

There has been no progress on PQL.

There has been no progress on DataLink.

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Data Models WG

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