IVOA Executive Committee Meeting (FM23)

Sunday May 13 2007 @ 17.30-20.00 (Beijing Local Time)

Logistics

Full Meeting: Floor 2, Meeting Room 5 (Beijing Oriental Culture Hotel, Beijing, China)

Agenda

1. Roll Call and Agenda
2. Minutes of TM22
3. Review of Actions
4. Approval of new IVOA Recommendation(s) [standing item]
5. Discussion of the IVOA Assessment (FG/DDY)
6. Working Groups and Interest Groups
   • Standardisation process: highlights, concerns, goals (RW)
   • Proposal for creation of Solar System IG
7. Status of the Assessment of Implementation of IVOA standards in Data Centres (DS/CA)
8. Status of the preparation of the Fall 2007 Interoperability meeting (NW)
9. Status of the preparation of the Spring 2008 Interoperability meeting (FP)
10. Data and venue of the next Exec meeting
11. AOB
12. Summary of Actions

Reports from the Projects

ArVO

AstroGrid

During the last few months, the main focus of AstroGrid has been on two main areas. The first is improving robustness and reliability of core services, where we have made significant improvements. The second is updating and completing end user documentation, which is also now much improved and close to completion. Meanwhile we have also been undertaking a review of "fitness for purpose", looking towards our operational deployment phase next year. This has included both a survey of users, and an internal "brainstorming" review.

We have recently had official notification of the success of our most recent funding proposal. We have been funded at a healthy level -three quarters of our request - but for just two years rather than the requested five. This means we are funded through to the end of 2009. The feedback was essentially that reviewers were very impressed with what we had achieved, and remain convinced of the potential, but were not yet quite convinced that we were ready to be funded as a steady-state operations project. (This is a good judgment of the worldwide VO perhaps !) We will be reviewed again in eighteen months.

Australia-VO

China-VO

CVO

VObs.it (aka DRACO) Italy

Euro-VO

France VO

GAVO

HVO

Japan-VO

JSPS approved to run the Core-to-Core program by the JVO in the fiscal year 2007, that strongly supports activities of JVO.

JVO made a trial implementation of the NaReGi (National Research Grid Initiative in Japan) middleware into a part of its data analysis service by JVO. It was found that the middleware is still premature for operations phase, however, a graphical user interface for the Work Flow builder seems very useful. JVO will continue to evaluate the middleware, and will contribute to comment the middleware for the NaReGi project to improve it.

Korean VO

NVO

RVO

SVO

VO-India

Reports from WGs & IGs(follows order as at http://www.ivoa.net/forum/)

Data Access Layer WG

Data Models WG

Grid and Web Services Working Group

Registry WG

Semantics/UCD WG

VOEvent

VOQL WG

VOTable WG

Applications IG

Astro-RG IG

A very successful workshop was held at OGF 20, Manchester, UK (9 May 2007). Details of the agenda are at IVOA.GgfIvoaMay07WorkShop and the presentation materials linked from the OGF20 schedule page. It is apparent that there is increasing interest in the use of distributed computing infrastructure, and that there is activity outside of the IVOA in this area. The IVOA Astro-RG Interest Group is a good forum to allow more engagement with large external groups such as LOFAR/ SKA who may need to integrate their grid based computational systems to the VO.

Data Curation and Preservation IG

Theory IG