PyVO and the end User



Notes


Participants: 67
Presenter / Chair: Tess Jaffe / Tom Donaldson
Slides: https://wiki.ivoa.net/internal/IVOA/InterOpMay2020Apps/ivoa_202005_session.pdf

NAVO's experience from running 4 AAS workshops.

PyVO workflow, as used in the AAS tutorials:
    Step 1: search the registry -- because archive-agnostic.
    Step 2: more info from each potential service
    Step 3: access the data
    There are details to this users should not have to worry about, how do we simplify the process?

Reminders for users/class participants:

Developed notebooks: http://github.com/NASA-NAVO/navo-workshop


Questions from Tess:

Adrian Damian: working on VO module in astroquery that may provide something in this archive-agnostic niche at a higher level than PyVO does.https://github.com/astropy/astroquery/pull/1679

Andy Lawrence: Notebooks versus clients like TOPCAT in workflow? Good for teaching but folks are used to switching to some other client tool.

Markus and Hendrik: GAVO workshops go three days. Starts with tutorials in TOPCAT, Aladin and Splat, then ADQL, then PyVO last. Treat PyVO as useful for larger-scale programmatic access for KDD, machine learning, etc. Results have been mixed. Some expertise in Python definitely required.

Sync vs Async: there is some difference between data centers in expectations and workflow: CADC streams sync results, so not limited. Others (Rubin, MAST, ...) have a higher result limit for async mode queries because they're expected to be larger jobs.  Dave M: early in TAP, design expected all programmatic access to use async, and sync was for short browser request.



Call for community support: general idea PyVO is well designed and gaining critical mass.





Running Questions



Bruce Berriman: Does PyVO handle proprietary data?

Mark Taylor: User feedback?

Christine: 10k foot view: spectrum from nuts and bolts to simplified astroquery encapsulation, where does PyVO in general fit, and where do we want to wrap it in/for notebooks.
JJ: where does the workshop/tutorial contents fit with archive-specific astroquery howto? CADC's astroquery module is built on top of PyVO, others aren't.
Anais Oberto: method for parallelizing queries? Keeping track of the async jobs?