IVOA Executive Committee Meeting (FM69)

FM69 - Sun, 14 May 2017 - 16:00 CST (08:00 UTC), Shanghai Astronomical Observatory (SHAO)

FM69S - Wed, 17 May 2017 - 12:30 CST (4:30 UTC), Jiangou Hotel - Rm D

Contents

• IVOA Executive Committee Meeting (FM69)
  • Logistics
  • Agenda
  • Reports from the Projects
    • Argentina - NOVA
    • ArVO
    • AstroGrid
    • Australia-VO
    • BRAVO
    • China-VO
    • ChiVO
    • CVO
    • Euro-VO
    • ESAVO
    • France VO
    • GAVO
    • HVO
    • VObs.it
    • Japan-VO
    • Ukraine VO
    • USVOA
    • RVO
    • SA^3
    • SVO
    • VO-India
  • Report from the TCG
  • Reports from the WGs

Logistics

Sunday, May 14, 2017 @16:00 CST (08:00 UTC)

Wednesday, 17 May 2017 - 12:30 CST (4:30 UTC)

Agenda FM69

1. Roll Call and Agenda (JE)
2. Minutes of TM68
3. Review of Actions
4. Project Reports [Significant Events Only]
5. Overall TCG status
6. Approval of new IVOA Recommendation(s) [Standing Item]
7. The 'Open Universe' initiative
   • Meeting in Rome update
   • Preparations for Vienna meeting in Nov
8. Media group
   • Media group formal endorsement
   • IVOA Newsletter schedule
9. Solar System IG
10. CAOM (Common Archive Observation Process) approval process
11. IVOA term expirations (see list below)
12. Committee on Science Priorities - new chair search
    
13. Committee on Standards and Processes - new chair search
14. Web page review and maintenance
15. Update on Northern Fall 2017 - Santiago, Chile (Oct 27-19)
16. Future Interops
    • Northern Spring 2018 - IVOA discussion
    • Northern Fall 2018 - Washington DC/ADASS (Oct) - IVOA discussion
17. Date of Next Exec Meeting - Wed, May 17, 12:30 CLT (04:30 UTC)
18. AOB
19. Review of Action Items

• Positions with 12/2016 expiration with *no extension* available:
  • Education: Ch: Massimo Ramella, VCh: Sudhanshu Barway
• Positions with 5/2017 expiration with *no extension* available:
  • Time Domain: Ch: John Swinbank
• Positions with 5/2017 expiration with *1 year extension* available:
  • Applications: Ch: Pierre Fernique, VCh: Tom Donaldson
  • Data Access: Ch: Francois Bonnarel, VCh: Marco Molinaro
  • Data Curation: Ch: Francoise Genova
  • Registry: Ch: Markus Demleitner

Argentina-NOVA

ArVO

AstroGrid

Australia-VO

BRAVO

China-VO

• The main node of China-VO was immigrated to Alibaba Cloud, the largest public cloud computing provider in China.
• Awarded list for the 3rd national WWT Tours Contest is available. The Awarded Ceremony will be held on June 11 at Chinese Science & Technology Museum.
• IAU Inter-Commission B2-C1-C2 WG “Data Driven Astronomy Education and Public Outreach (DAEPO)” was created officially in April, which was initiated by China-VO and currently chaired by Chenzhou Cui.

ChiVO

1) ChiVO offers SCS, SIA and TAP for all public ALMA data products, and we expect to offer the raw data at the end of the year. 
We are making the last tests before updating our publishing registry to point to our new data center (with 1 PB storage).
2) Our cloud-based analysis app (JOVIAL) is in beta mode and accessed through VPN. This service will be compatible with VO DAL protocols (client) and SAMP (from server to client).
3) We continue to develop ACALib to be used in JOVIAL, from which two new projects were needed (CASPYTER and PYCUPID).

CVO

Euro_VO

ESAVO

France VO

GAVO

The GAVO Data Centers in Heidelberg and Potsdam keep maintaining and developing services. A substantial number of new services have been created.

In software, we have been busy removing features from DaCHS and smoothing out legacy wrinkles in preparation for a 1.0 release. We also keep developing pyVO, having updated the Registry interface to use standard RegTAP rather than the proprietary STScI interface. First Datalink code exists. A bugfix release of the spherical geometry database extension pgsphere is imminent, a release with added MOC functionality will take a bit longer (but interested parties are welcome to betas). We have also started to implement some new features in SPLAT-VO: displaying spectral lines from SLAP and VAMDC services, and timeseries support.

In standards, we worked on VOResource 1.1 adoption; our Registry interface at reg.g-vo.org has been extended to provide a prototype for working with the new features. We also continued to work with other projects in making our GloTS service (which currently is what most clients base their TAP table discovery on) obsolete eventually (that's the discovering dependent data note). We're also cooperating on EPN-TAP evolution, for instance, by working out how GeoJSON can be integrated into the VO stack.

GAVO continues activities in bolstering VO takeup by reaching out to scientists. One highlight since the last Interop has been a Gaia data access workshop in Heidelberg that included in-depth introductions into several VO techniques.

HVO

VObs.it

Japan-VO

Japan-VO has recently released a new feature: a web-based quick-look system for Suprime-CAM that had been equipped with the Subaru telescope. This web-based quick-look system utilizes our experience with the ALMA WebQL system (we demonstrated the system in the IVOA interop meeting in South Sfrica).

An exapmle can be found at http://jvo.nao.ac.jp/subaruwebql/SubaruWebQL.html?dataId=SUPM1153EF6501CD700 . You can zoom-in and zoom-out images. After releasing the Suprime-CAM QL, data request to the JVO site incresed to ~500-600 GB per month. We are updating the ALMAWebQL.

RVO

SA^3

SVO

Ukraine_VO

USVOA

HEASARC:

• At the HEASARC, VO access to INTEGRAL spectral data will shortly be released. For the first time, a combined scorecard for all VO sites including the measurement of uptime, validation results for data interfaces, and validation of the sites published metadata has been sent to the IVOA meeting.

• The NAVO proposal to continue its operations for the period October 17 through September 20 was reviewed by NASA, and NAVO is awaiting the results.

• Chandra Data in ESASky: We’ve been coordinating with the the team from ESASky and notified Chandra Users in March that footprints and links to Chandra data and the Chandra Source Catalog (CSC), version 1.1, can now be queried in ESASky (http://sky.esa.int). Further work to include HIPs is underway. Sample HIPs data has been shared and reviewed. Plan to build Chandra HIPs files on and end of year timeframe.
• A review and upgrade of Chandra's VO interfaces has recently been concluded to use the latest IVOA standards. An Archive release with the updated interfaces is planned for early June.
• Iris 3.0 was released in March 2017. Iris has undergone a full overhaul on the Visualizer, Metadata Browser, and Fitting Tool. The Visualizer and Metadata Browser now use STILTS -- the same library that powers TOPCAT -- as their backend. High-resoultion spectra can now be plotted. The Fitting Tool encapsulates the models, parameter values, fitting options, and fit statistics in one window.

Report from the TCG

Registry

VOResource 1.1 (with new features like support for DOIs and ORCIDs, mirror URLs, vocabularies, license URIs and many other little fixes) has seen first implementations and some minor changes. There is also a draft for RegTAP 1.1 giving access to the new features. We have not gone for PR before Shanghai as we wanted more implemenation experience.

Registry Interfaces 1.1 is in late RFC; a couple of uncomplicated comments have come in and have been taken care of, some reviews are still missing.

The note on discovering dependent resources ("table registration") still is in RFC. Many major data centers have not yet fully adopted the proposed method, so the prototype interface to it in TOPCAT still is significantly less complete that the current GloTS-based one. We hope we can convince the relevant publishing registry operators to provide the missing metadata until the next interop.

On enabling STC searches in the Registry, we have now a first implementation with MOC-based footprints in Heidelberg, fed from harvesting separate footprint endpoints and in-record, "classic" STC-X coverages. There's still some implemenation work to do before this fully supports ADQL geometry operations (so far, only operations with points are implemented), but it's already clear that one of the major challenges to work out is how to deal with the plethora of resources declaring themselves as covering the entire sky.

On the focus on time series, we're now discussing a simple hack based on utype annotation of tablesets of SSA services to allow clients to identify time series services until a proper SSA evolution (or something else) comes around (unless the IVOA decides that time series discovery should go through obscore exclusively).

We're also co-operating with the Edu IG on making tutorials and similar material discoverable. Based on experience with the VOTT directory of tutorials (which is based on prototype records), we've proposed some changes to the extension schema specified in a draft note that's been around for a while.

SimpleDALRegExt has been ready for REC since last year; all that's missing is Exec approval.

Semantics

UCD: New terms added to the UCD tree. Update of the UCD v1.3 working draft .

• Comments and tests welcome.
• A revision of the CDS assigning tool is ready.
• Solar and Planetary Data Interest Group will propose new requirements. Discussed at the Semantics session at this Interop meeting (Shanghai).
• To discuss: A new way to maintain UCD vocabulary: The specification document could be completed by new tools:
  validators, assigning tools(INAF, CDS, etc.) would help.

• Revision of the access to the vocabulary.
• purl.org links are no longer supported so VO Paris is now supporting the distribution of the skos concepts in this.
• requires to be corrected in the Simulation Datamodel for accessing the SKOS concepts of model instances.