IVOA Executive Committee Meeting (TM21)

Tues Dec 5 2006 @ 15.00-16.30 GMT

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Logistics

Telecon: Check email from Bob Hanisch 27 Nov 2006 - let him know how you will connect to the NASA telecon service by 30 Nov 2006.

Agenda (draft: ver 20061127)

1. Roll Call and Agenda
2. Minutes of FM20
3. Review of Actions
4. Approval of new IVOA Recommendation(s) [Standing Item]
5. Status of the IVOA assessment (FG/DDY)
6. WG/IG/Standardisation process: RW to report on
   • Recommendation process (Identifiers, Registry Metadata, UCD list)
   • Nominations for vice chairs
   • Evolution of the Apps IG
   • Term limits: list of WG chairs at and beyond a 3-year term
   • Status report on SSA, VOQL, EPO metadata
7. Status of the Assessment of Implementation of IVOA standards in Data Centres (DS/CA)
8. Status of the preparation of the Beijing Interoperability meeting (CC)
9. Future Interop meetings
10. Schedule of other IVOA-related events (all)
11. Data and Venue of the next Exec meeting (telecon?)
12. AOB
13. Summary of Actions

Reports from the Projects

ArVO

Recently the Armenian VO received a new office in Byurakan. There are 6 persons working for ArVO: Areg Mickaelian (PI), Tigran Magakian (Project scientist), Lida Erastova, Lusine Sargsyan, Lilit Hovhannisyan, and Parandzem Sinamyan. Two more students are involved in the project as well. ArVO continued its development on the collaboration between its team based in the Byurakan Astrophysical Observatory (BAO) and the Institute of Problems of Informatics and Automation (IPIA) of the Armenian National Academy of Sciences. The IPIA has a powerful Armcluster computer, where a number of large scientific projects are being carried out. The IPIA allocates software experts for joint work with the Byurakan team members (all are astronomers). A 1TB disk space has been allocated on the ArmCluster for ArVO's activities. This will be used for a number of large astronomical catalogs, and the tasks that will run on the Armcluster will be cross-correlations between large catalogs (including the DFBS spectroscopic database), theoretical calculations, and modeling.

The DFBS Roma web interface (DFBS portal) is almost finished. A.Mickaelian will visit Rome this December to finalize the tasks, and to start the low-dispersion spectra classification works. ArVO team member L.Sargsyan will have a 2 months stay in Rome for this work. It is planned that the users will have access to all 40,000,000 spectra and their suggested classification, which will allow to select objects of necessary types, make samples, study definite fields, etc.

The Digitization works of the Byurakan archive plates are being continued. The digitized Byurakan plates will make up the main part of the Armenian astronomical data centre. The establishment and utilization of the Virtual Observatories standards in Armenia is being continued, too.

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AstroGrid

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China-VO

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CVO

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VObs.it (aka DRACO) Italy

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Euro-VO

The Euro-VO Web site (http://www.euro-vo.org/pub/), aimed at providing information about the VO and Euro-VO to scientists and technical staff, should have been mentioned in an earlier report. It also offers a help desk (http://help.euro-vo.org/esupport/).

The second meeting of the Euro-VO Science Advisory Committee (SAC) took place on 22 November 2006 at ESRIN, Frascati, Italy. The SAC was briefed on the latest Euro-VO developments and plans. Some SAC members reported on their testing of EURO-VO tools, which was overall positive. The Euro-VO project has decided to follow the SAC's suggestion of having a "science verification" call for proposals. This will be aimed at the support of a small number of teams to work on science projects using VO tools. The project is currently working on the Announcement of Opportunity.

The Euro-VO Data Centre Alliance project started on 1 September 2006 (http://cds.u-strasbg.fr/twikiDCA/bin/view/EuroVODCA/WebHome). This is a Coordination Action, funded by the European Commission at a level of ~1.5 Meuros on 28 months. The main aim is to assist European Data Centres to take-up VO standards and to share best practice, and to gather feedback from implementation. Specific actions are also programmed on the definition of a framework for Theory in VO and on coordination with the computational grid. Eight partners participate in the project: CNRS/INSU (FVO, coordinator), ESA, ESO, INAF (VObs.it), INTA (SVO), MPG (GAVO), the University of Groningen representing NOVA, and the University of Leicester representing AstroGrid. Project coordinator: F. Genova, Project Manager: M. Depretz, Project Scientist: M. Allen.

The project has 6 Work Packages:

• WP1: Project management (INSU)
• WP2: Medium Term DCA strategy (INSU), which will produce in particular a census of European data centres and a Medium Term Strategic Plan. One of the first products of Euro-VO DCA is a definition of data centres in the VO context (http://cds.u-strasbg.fr/twikiDCA/bin/view/EuroVODCA/DataCentresinVO)
• WP3: Support to take-up and implementation of the VO framework (ESA/ESO), which contains WP3-2: Implementation feedback (AstroGrid). The next Euro-VO Workshop will be organised by WP3. It will be held in June 2007 in Villafranca (lead organizer: ESA).
• WP4: Theory in VO (GAVO)
• WP5: Coordination with computational grid projects (INAF)
• WP6: Support to data centres from other European countries (INTA)

A Theory and a Grid Workshops will be organized by WP4 and WP5, probably diring the second semester of 2007, consecutive and at the same location to facilitate attendance. A specific Workshop on "Spectroscopic Science and the Virtual Observatory" will be organized by WP3 at ESA during the first quarter of 2007.

Posted by F. Genova, 4 December 2006

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France VO

France-VO activities since the IAU meeting in August 2006:

(1) The Action Specifique Observatoires Virtuels France (AS OV) held its annual meeting in Paris on 28-30 November 2006. Projects and Working Groups presented their activities, and the European context (in particular with the beginning of the EuroVO-DCA project) was discussed. All presentations and the meeting conclusions will soon be made available on the meeting web site (http://www.france-vo.org/twiki/bin/view/ASOVFrance/Reunion2006, in French). The general feeling is that tremendous progress has been made since the Opening meeting of AS OV in April 2005, with a significant participation to IVOA meetings and several teams providing and/or developing services and tools for the VO, with a real commitment of their Observatory/laboratory authorities to these actions. The positive role of the Working Groups supported by AS OV was also underlined, to build a community on specific topics and prepare input for IVOA and/or Euro-VO. The AS OV Scientific Council met in the afternoon of November 30th, to prepare the 2007 AO and to draw the conclusions of the 2006 census in the light of the EuroVO-DCA census action.

(2) Meetings organized by AS OV Working Groups:

• Geodetics and Fundamental Astronomy Working Group: first meeting on 29 September 2006, OCA, Grasse
• Databases in Stellar Spectroscopy: 18-19 October 2006, Paris
• Data valorisation in planetology: 6 December 2006, Paris
• Workflow Working Group: third meeting on 21 December, Paris
• Grid Working Group: first meeting on 9 January 2007, Lyon

(3) Technical meetings:

• Software bricks for the VO, 13 December 2006, Paris
• A third tutorial for developers (beginner level) will be organized by CDS in Strasbourg in January or Fevruary 2007.

Posted by F. Genova, 4 December 2006

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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

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RVO

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SVO

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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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Data Access Layer WG

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Data Models WG

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Grid and Web Services Working Group

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Registry WG

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Semantics/UCD WG

The PR document with the updated list of UCD-words has passed the RFC period with a few comments, all accepted. I asked the Exec to promote Version 1.21 to the level of IVOA Recommendation. This document will replace IVOA Rec v1.11.

Work is in progress on the first Ontology of astronomical object types. A TN has been issued the 31st of October 2006. Being a repository of astronomical knowledge, the Ontology is necessarily a collaborative effort of the whole scientific community collaborating within the IVOA. Contributions were asked, and an updated version of the TN will soon be released for further discussion (and contribution).

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VOEvent

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VOQL WG

The VOQL Technical Experts Group (VOQL-TEG) has celebrated two meetings so far. Outcomes from these two meetings will be fed to the community in the coming days.

Agenda, Minutes and discussions within these meetings can be seen at the VOQL-TEG mail archive (http://www.ivoa.net/forum/voql-teg/0611/date.htm)

The most significant outcome of the group so far is a clear separation of Language, Protocol and Service. The items the VOQL group will be dealing with are therefore:

1.- The Language.

This will be a refurbishing of the current ADQL able to accomodate different communities' needs. A document only dealing with the Language specification will be produced.

2.- The Protocol.

This will deal with how to access data using the ADQL language. A new document will be produced for this so called Table Access Protocol (TAP). The chair of the Data Access Layer group is a permanent member of the VOQL-TEG to co-author the initial creation of this protocol

3.- The Service.

This will deal with the important issue of Cross-match. A new document will be produced for a type of services dealing directly with cross-matching of sources (of whichever type). This work will be initiated within the VOQL-TEG and evolved in conjunction with other IVOA groups.

Expected deliveries:

1.- Refurbished ADQL doc in quite a mature state by China 2007 interop.

2.- First draft of the Table Access Protocol (TAP) doc by China 2007 interop.

Further discussions are needed to estimate possible due dates for crossmatch service specification.

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VOTable WG

The connection of the VOTable schema to the other components of the IVOA were discussed (IVOA meeting in Moscow); several scenarios using the utype linkage mechanism were presented and are being discussed.

The VOTable schema is also being tested against a few code generators (for Java and C#).

For both aspects, it is expected to reach final conclusions and agreements at the next IVOA meeting.

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Applications IG

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Astro-RG IG

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Data Curation and Preservation IG

There are four large initiatives in the EU and the UK that are investigating preservation: - CASPAR (David Giaretta) - PLANETS (Adam Farquhar, Hans Hofmann) - DPE (Seamus Ross) - Digital Curation Centre (Chris Rusbridge)

The projects are investigating representation (CASPAR) - how to characterize the structure and information content of digital documents, and management policies (PLANETS) - how to enforce preservation policies such as the number of replicas and migration to new technology. They are also constructing testbeds for the demonstration of preservation tools and services.

The related projects in the US include: - NARA Transcontinental Persistent Archive - NHPRC Persistent Archive Testbed - Library of Congress NDIIPP - Library of Congress DigArch - DSpace - Fedora

Each of these preservation projects is building upon data grid technology for the management of distributed shared collections. The goal is to differentiate between management of distributed data and application of preservation processes that generate the required archival form.

SDSC is collaborating on development of open source software with these projects based on iRODS (integrated Rule-Oriented Data System). The first release is scheduled in the next 1-2 weeks. This new technology is intended to automate the application of management policies across distributed shared collections.

The IVOA needs to specify the management policies that are required for image archives, for data products used in publications, and for the processes that generate the data products (mosaics, image cutouts, simulation output).

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Theory IG

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-- NicholasWalton - 27 Nov 2006