IVOA Web>IvoaTCG>ProgramPrepVirtualMay2021>InterOpMay2021>InterOpMay2021Astropy (2021-06-01, TomDonaldson)

Discussion: IVOA/Astropy/Astroquery/PyVO Collaboration

Schedule Summary
Session	DateTime UTC	UTC-08:00	UTC-05:00	UTC+02:00	UTC+08:00	UTC+11:00
Session	DateTime UTC	Victoria BC/Pasadena	Washington DC	Strasbourg	Perth/Beijing	Canberra
Discussion Session	May 25 15:00	May 25 08:00	May 25 11:00	May 25 17:00	May 25 23:00	May 26 01:00

Discussion Session

Time: Tuesday May 25 15:00 UTC

With the success of the Astropy hack sessions at the 2019 Paris Interoperability Meeting (summary slides) and significant VO-related development in PyVO, Astroquery and Astropy since, this is an opportunity to discuss some details of the collaboration to help ensure its continued success.

Discussion topics are suggested below with an accompanying outline in the Etherpad link. Please add notes there to help inform and guide the discussions as well as suggesting other potential topics to cover in this or future meetings.

The time schedule is ambitious, so topics may need to be abbreviated (or skipped), but let's try to at least establish the next step for the discussion (splinter meeting, github discussion, etc.).

Speaker(s)	Title and Abstract	Time	Material
Bruno Merin	Introduction A brief high-level review of the goals and recent history of IVOA/Astropy to help set the context for the discussions.	10'	pdf
All	Where to Handle VOTable Metadata Astropy has a very solid VOTable parser and writer which is able to recognize and validate some, but not all, of the metadata elements. What has been particularly elusive is doing something meaningful based on the metadata such as creating SkyCoord objects for rows in a source catalog VOTable. With efforts underway in the Data Model working group to make the metadata more rigorous and unambiguous, automatic mapping to Astropy objects may become both more possible and more desired (see the presentations and discussions in the Data Model Workshop sessions this week). A natural question then is where do such implementations belong (PyVO, Astropy, other)?	15'	N/A
All	Unifying PyVO's TAP with Astroquery's TAPPlus One of the goals coming out of the Paris meeting was to refactor Astroquery modules to use TAP features implemented in PyVO instead of those implemented in the Astroquery TAPPlus module. PyVO TAP evolved substantially since then, but is not identical to TAPPlus either in feature set or usability details. How do we move forward towards identifying and implementing the changes needed in PyVO to be able to deprecate TAPPlus and refactor the Astroquery modules that use it?	15'	N/A
All	Governance and Process Improvements PyVO is currently an Astropy affiliated package, though there were initial plans to work towards a status of coordinated package. Let's clarify the differences and practical impacts and set expectations/goals for future. IVOA participation in Astropy projects seems generally good. What are some ways to improve?	10'	N/A
All	Next Steps Should we schedule splinter meetings or hack sessions to continue work on any topic? What homework should be completed prior to such a meeting?	5'	N/A