Email to all the main working groups, starting the discussion about updating our services for the 2020's.

Dear IVOA members,

Many of our service specifications date back to the early 2000's when XML, SOAP and WSDL were the latest technologies everyone was using.

The question of updating our standards to be more in line with more modern software development practices such as JSON serialization and Python web-service frameworks has been raised a number of times.

Input from the Rubin team has been very constructive in helping to highlight places where the standards may need updating and helping to develop the changes needed. In particular I recomend you have a quick look at xxx, which outlines a number of changes which could help bring the IVOA standards up to date.

This year's IVOA interop meeting will be held in Bologna, Italy from 8 May to 12 May, and we would like to dedicate one of the GWS sessions to discussing this topic.

In preparation, we will be posting a series of questions on the Grid & Web Services mailing list to seed the discussion.

The idea is to begin the initial stages of the discussion, outlining the problems and possible solutions on the mailing list so that when we join the face to face meeting everyone is on the same page.

The first step is to invite all interested parties to make sure you are subscribed to the Grid & Web Services mailing list.

Registration is simple, and we collect no personal infrmation beyond your email address and a password. http://mail.ivoa.net/mailman/listinfo/grid

We will begin posting an initial set of seed topics to start the discussion over the next few days.

Best regards,
The GWS team,
Giuliano Taffoni <giuliano.taffoni@inaf.it>,
Dave Morris <dmr@roe.ac.uk>

Email to the GWS working group, inviting talks for the GWS sessions.

Dear Grid & Web Services working group,

This year's IVOA interop meeting will be held in Bologna, Italy from 8 May to 12 May. https://indico.ict.inaf.it/event/2285/

We are in the process of developing the schedule of sessions and talks for the meeting. https://wiki.ivoa.net/twiki/bin/view/IVOA/InterOpMay2023

We have 2 sessions dedicated to the Grid & Web Services working group and we would like to invite you to submit abstracts for talks you would like to present.

There are a couple of topics that people have already expressed interest in discussion during these sessions.

The first topic is to look at how we can update the IVOA web service standards to be more in line with modern software and service development practices such as JSON serialization and Python web-service frameworks to develop the services.

The second topic is to look at what the IVOA needs to provide to facilitate code-to-the-data remote execution. This covers a broad range of things from how we can describe and discover data sets and execution platforms, how we can describe workflows that bring code and data together, and how we can execute these workflows and collect the results.

If you have other topics that you would like to discuss please feel free to submit an abstract and we will endeavour to include you in one of the GWS sessions.

Looking forward to seeing you all in person.

Best regards,
The GWS team,
Giuliano Taffoni <giuliano.taffoni@inaf.it>,
Dave Morris <dmr@roe.ac.uk>