IVOA Operations Interest Group

Overview

Organisation

• Chair: Steve Groom
• Vice Chair: Tamara Civera

Goal of the IVOA Operations Interest Group

Coordinate and publicize activities of individuals, institutions and groups interested in facilitating robust operations of distributed astronomy applications, particularly those based upon implementations of IVOA protocols.

See also the Operations IG Charter.

Specific responsibilities

1. Publicize existing forums and encourage new ones for monitoring services, notifications, discussions and questions regarding “real-time” operations of VO / distributed services.
2. Promote discussion within the IVOA on standards and practices that would increase the reliability of VO implementations.
3. Develop nominal implementation strategies for VO services as guides to best practice in the operational use of VO protocols.
4. Periodically provide reports to the IVOA executive and WGs summarizing availability, quality and usage statistics for distributed services and VO protocols.
5. During the IVOA standards review process, assess the validation capabilities that are now required as part of new standards.

Mailing list

ops@ivoa.net

Operations Interest Group discussion forum ( archive)

Roadmap

See the Operations entry in the IVOA Roadmap document (currently 2024B)

Operations Projects

Federated Validation Services

The following links are to reports from services that perform bulk validation on a regular basis of all registered services of particular types (SCS, SIA, SSA, TAP, ...). If you are the operator of a registered service, you can (and should!) go here to see whether your service is passing the validation tests.

• PADC
• Euro-VO
• HEASARC

Coordination of VO validation services

It was agreed that the three sites that are currently collecting validation statistics will try to coordinate their activities. The first step is to provide a standard set of identifiers for issues so that results from the validators can be compared. This will allow us to compare the validator results and 'validate' the validators.

• NCSA/HEASARC Validation tests (Conesearch and SIA)
• VO Paris Validation Test
• ESA Validation Tests

Data from these documents has been combined into the following documents:

• Cone Search Protocol Valiation Errors
• Simple Image Access Protocol Validation Errors

Analysis of the results from these documents suggests that the validators are making somewhat different queries and that any given validator is only testing a subset of all poassible errors. Negative results regarding a service are generally valid. In principle a service should pass all validators.

List of Validation Software

The Operations IG maintains a list of available validation software is indexed by the IVOA standard whose content they check, on the wiki page IvoaValidatorsSummary. This list is usually reviewed at six-monthly Interop meetings, but if you have updates you can edit the wiki page directly.

Procedure for Removing Non-Responsive Services

VO-Paris has presented a plan for a process for removing non-responsive services from the Registry which was presented to the Exec and discussed in the Interest Group. A revised version will be provided.

A revised procedure was adoped by the IVOA in October 2016.

Identifying Client/Server software: SoftID

Ops IG is considering best practice for client and server software to report its identity and purpose to components with which is is interacting (User-Agent and Server HTTP headers). For more information see page SoftID.

Operations sessions

• General discussion of operational issues of VO services
• Monitoring and validation reviews of VO services
• Development and deployment of validation services
• Discussion of operational best practice in VO service deployment and operations.

IVOA Interoperability Meetings

• InterOpNov2024Ops - Malta
  • Session 1: Operations
• InterOpMay2024Ops - Sydney
  • Session 1: Operations
• InterOpNov2023Ops - Tucson
  • Session 1: Operations
• InterOpMay2023Ops - Bologna
  • Session 1: Reports and Status
  • Session 2: Applications and Discussion
• InterOpOct2022Ops - virtual
  • Session 1: Operations
• InterOpApr2022Ops - virtual
  • Session 1: Operations and Standards
  • Session 2: Operational Status
• InterOpNov2021Ops - virtual
  • Session 1: Operations
• InterOpMay2021Ops - virtual
  • Session 1: Validator showcase
  • Session 2: Service compliance
• InterOpNov2020Ops - virtual
  • Session 1: Operations
• Northern Spring 2020 - virtual
  • no session
• InterOpOct2019Ops - Groningen
  • Session 1: Operations
• InterOpMay2019Ops - Paris
  • Session 1: Operations Status and Review
  • Session 2: Facility Operations and Current Issues
• InterOpNov2018Ops - College Park
  • Session 1: Operations
• InterOpMay2018Ops - Victoria
  • Session 1: Status, Operational Issues and Validation
  • Session 2: Experience and Issues
• InterOpOct2017Ops - Santiago
  • Session 1: Implementations and Operational Issues
• InterOpMay2017-Ops - Shanghai
  • Session 1: Implementations and Ops Issues
  • Session 2: Ops review and Validation
• InteropOct2016Ops - Trieste
  • Session 1: Operations
• InterOpMay2016-Ops - Cape Town
  • Session 1: Operations review and Validation
  • Session 2: Implementations and Ops Issues
• InteropOct2015Ops - Sydney
  • Session 1: Building VO services
  • Session 2: VO Operations
• InteropOpsJune2015 - Sesto
  • Session 1: Group organization and current statistics of VO services
  • Session 2: Using validation, monitoring and notification services