announcements: VO enabled SciSoft VII Richard Hook We think it might be a good idea to advertise the new "VO-enabled" Scisoft VII at the IVOA. This would just need a few minutes, perhaps in the first Applications session, for me to explain what it is, what is included, and maybe hand out DVDs (we should have them by then, but I am checking). ---------------------- Sky in Google Earth Ryan Scranton ---------------------- World Wide Telescope Jonathan Fay Microsoft Research, collaborating with other research orginazations, is developing a browser application in furtherance of Jim Gray and Alex Szalay's vision of the internet as a telescope. The application alows real-time viewing of many different datasets, extensible data access, creation and playback of rich-media tours and rich comminty integration to allow collaboration at any level. The WWT is intended to develop into a rich front end for many services exposed thru the IVOA set of standards. ---------------------- Using Taverna for Astronomy and the Virtual Observatories Kevin Benson Taverna is an application that builds workflows which enable complex data analysis to be undertaken. It originated in the bioinformatics world, but a modular, plug-and-play architecture make it applicable to many other domains once suitable extensions have been developed. This presentation and demonstration will show such an extension that makes Taverna a powerful tool for Astronomy and especially Virtual Observatories. It will show both simple workflows (such as extracting data and images from SIA/Cone Search services) to more intricate workflows that include sophisticated data extraction and crossmatching techniques. ---------------------- Mathematical algorithms for spectral analysis within the VO framework Andrea Laruelo We present a series of algorithms for spectral analysis in the context of highly distributed data. These algorithms are integrated in VOSpec, the ESAVO tool for handling spectra. Analysis utilities for astronomical data within the VO framework must be ready to deal with a wide variety of data coming from different sources and at different wavelengths. For spectral analysis tools, that implies dealing with unevenly samplings and unequal ranges of definition for each spectra. Such tools must also be able to deal with grids of theoretical models, variable dimension of the parameters space, multi valuated spectra, interpolation techniques, spectral noise estimation, etc. The development of utilities capable of handling these issues is a cornerstone of the progress of the analysis of astronomical data. The presented algorithms cover a wide range of astronomical functionalities. Some examples are: -Discrete wavelet analysis allowing different mother wavelet functions -Several filtering techniques -Arithmetic and convolution operations between spectra -Bisector and mirroring methods -Wavelength-to-velocity conversion -Best Fit tool based on a discretized version of the Levenberg-Marquardt method ---------------------- New features in TOPCAT version 3 Mark Taylor TOPCAT version 3, released July/August 2007, provides a number of new graphical features which further enhance its capabilities for visualising extensive multi-column tabular datasets. These include highly configurable error bars in 2 and 3 dimensions, the ability to colour plotted points according to data values, weighting of histograms and density plots by an additional axis, annotation of plotted points with text labels, and choice of colour maps for density plots. New non-graphical features include better access to columns labelled by UCD, direct load of data from the GAVO Millennium Simulation database, quantile calculations in the statistics window, and export of tables resulting from histogram and statistics calculations. ----------------------- VO-CLI: Command-line Tools for the VO Mike Fitzpatrick The VOClient interface provides an API that allows applications to be developed in a wide variety of languages. Using these interface, we've developed a set of command-line interface tools that provide immediate access to services such as the Sesame name resolver, Registry, and DAL data services. These tools provide a familiar unix-like interface that can be used from the desktop or in a scripting environment while hiding much of the complexity of the VO from novice users. A multi-threaded, multi-process approach to data queries and access enables fast access for requests spanning many objects or resources. Future plans, availability, and the relationship to similar tools being developed for use within IRAF will be discussed during a demo. ----------------------- Accessing the VO from the command line Eduardo A Gonzalez-Solares In this demo I will show how to access the services provided by the VO from the command line interface. Using Python connected to the AstroRuntime (AR) I will show how to perform image and catalogue queries, catalogue cross matches and how the results can be sent to other applications connected via PLASTIC like TopCat and Aladin. Basically anything that can be done using a GUI can be done from the command line with the benefit that the latter provides a transcript of the user actions. Moreover astronomers used to do programming in Python can start using the VO without having to go through a steep learning curve and also use the set of routines which are already writen in Python to perform fitting, plotting or operations in images (e.g. using PyRAF). ------------------------------------------- VOEvent in Google Sky Roy Williams The universe contains dynamic, rapidly changing phenomena, such as exploding and colliding stars, which cannot be easily represented in static images. Caltech scientists have provided an enhancement to Google Sky to help convey such events to the general public. The goal of this project is to enable automated dissemination and follow-up of various transient phenomena in the night sky within minutes of their detection. The Caltech application layer provides real-time updates of locations of two types of transient events in the sky: cosmic gamma-ray bursts, TeV gamma-ray events, and so-called gravitational microlensing events. I would also like to demonstrate a simple web service which allows any query to Vizier to be converted in minutes to a Google mashup on the sky. --------------------------- A demo of Google Sky and PLASTIC Alasdair Allan Using a combination of KML network links, XML-RPC and an embedded web server I have PLASTIC-enabled Google Sky for bi-directional messaging. I will briefly demonstrate the solution.