IVOA Executive Committee Meeting (FM87)

when: October 10, 2019, 2-4pm local time

where: ADASS Venue (Martini Plaza) Room 11

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IVOA exec FM87
Hosted by CXC Data Systems
Thursday, Oct 10, 2019 8:00 am | 3 hours | (UTC-05:00) Eastern Time (US & Canada)
Meeting number: 738 831 158
Password: FM87
https://sao.webex.com/sao/j.php?MTID=m490129c51642d7efa5e91e7c494d4ea5
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Draft Agenda FM87

1. Roll Call and Agenda
2. Minutes of TM86
3. Review of ACTIONS
4. Project Reports
5. Overall TCG Status
6. Approval of new IVOA Recommendation(s)
7. Renewal of IVOA Exec Chair and Vice Chair roles
8. IVOA codes of conduct
9. CAOM
10. Future Interops: Sydney May 2020 (Simon O'Toole)
11. Date of next Exec meeting
12. AOB - IVOA article for ADASS proceedings
13. Review of New Action Items

Reports from the Projects

Argentina-NOVA

ArVO

AstroGrid

Australia-VO

BRAVO

China-VO

National Astronomical Data Center (NADC) was announced by Chinese government in June as one of the first 20 national scientific data centers. NADC will become the official backend platform for the China-VO.

Informatization Working Committee, Chinese Astronomical Society, was unveiled on June 13, 2019. 4 working groups established in the committee, including Research Informatization WG, Management Informatization WG, Cyber-infrastructure WG, Education and Outreach Informatization WG. IWCC is the China-VO’s position at Chinese Astronomical Society.

DAEPO activities are fruitful in the last months

• WWT Teacher Training 2019, was held in Hangzhou from 14 until 16, August. More than 60 teachers across China attended the event. New WWT version with HiPS and VR enhancements and IAU Open Astronomy School Plan were introduced.
• “Data-driven Education and Public Outreach”, a parallel session was organized at the 6th China Scientific Data Conference held 21-23, August. China-South Africa workshop on the "Big Data Challenge in Astronomy" was held in Shanghai, followed by "Astronomy for Development Forum" from 17 to 21, June. China-VO team completed a planetarium under the theme of IAU OAD "Astronomy for a Better World" in May 2019. IAU OAD officer, Dr. Kevendran Govender, participated the forum in the new planetarium.
• China-VO Public Supernova Project (PSP) dataset was used in HUAWEI AI Futurelab College Student Contest. The award ceremony was held in July at University of Chinese Academy of Sciences.
• China-VO also attends the organization of the IAUS 367: Education and Heritage in the Era of Big Data Astronomy, which will be held in Argentina in 2020.

ChiVO

CVO

The CADC has continued development of the ARCADE science platform based on Docker, Kubernetes, and a NoVNC "desktop" display within the web browser. We are also working on using Jupyter notebooks for tutorials and science tools for exploring the archive and interactive data analysis.

The CADC has implemented all of the changes and new features of TAP-1.1 (open source libraries at https://github.com/opencadc) and deployed several TAP-1.1 services. The primary CADC archive search service is one of the TAP-1.1 reference implementations. In addition, we continue to prototype new features in our TAP servies, including (i) new DALI-1.2 xtypes and (ii) an extension to VOSI-tables to allow users to create and manage their own tables in the YouCat TAP service (https://ws-cadc.canfar.net/youcat/).

CADC developers have actively particpated in Astropy and PyVO work since the successful hackathon at the Paris Interop and we are committed to ongoing development.

Euro_VO

Euro-VO partners have been active in the ESCSPE project. This project finalised a work plan for the CEVO task "Connecting the ESFRI to the EOSC via the VO", and activities have been started for helping large astronomy infrastructures to use the VO. One example is the preparation of the group of radio astronomy ESCAPE partners (SKA, LOFAR, JIVE, ALMA) to participate in the "Radio Astronomy and VO" session at the Groningen Interop. ESCAPE partners have also been active in preparing the ADASS BoF on Science Platforms.

The ESCAPE project web pages are now live at https://projectescape.eu.

ESA

• First ESDC variability portal for HCV (Hubble Catalogue of Variables) http://hst.esac.esa.int/hcv-explorer/ (video: https://youtu.be/22SGQlEGjIE)

• ESASky (http://sky.esa.int): controlling with an iframe & release of pyESASky Jupyter widget (https://www.cosmos.esa.int/web/esdc/pyesasky)

• Access to external TAPs: Gaia archive and prototype in ESASky (video tutorial: https://youtu.be/ ysycmR3C8uk )

• New HST module published in astropy.astroquery and XMM-Newton module ongoing.

• New versions of ObsLocTAP and first complete prototype server implementation for INTEGRAL archive (http://integral.esa.int/visObsTap/

• Short/medium term: Working on the update TAP services to new standards i.e TAP 1.1 and ADQL 2.1

France VO - Action Spécifique Observatoires Virtuels France (ASOV)

GAVO

The GAVO Data Centers in Heidelberg and Potsdam keep maintaining and developing services. The most notable new data collection since the Paris is a mirror of the Byurakan survey developed jointly between ArVO and GAVO, which is can, in particular, be used to train for the Gaia RP/BP spectra. As usual, significant efforts also went into keeping our Registry services (RegTAP and GlotTS) up to date and keeping the whole Registry system tidy (e.g., having role="std" on all interfaces that should have it, throwing out ancient ProtoSpectralAccess capabilities).

On the software development side, numerous minor fixes and improvements went into our publication suite DaCHS, with release 1.4 planned for shortly after the Groningen Interop. Among items similar packages might want to take up are generate_series and tablesample to ADQL and an informative HTTP server header (talk during this Interop).

We also wrote and expanded software related to drafting Vocabularies in the VO 2, in particular the converters from various inputs to draft-compliant files, as well as a consumer/validator in python.

The new Vocabularies standard also was the main focus of our standards work. In addition, we prepared what we think should finally be the RegTAP 1.1 recommendation, moved ahead the catalog of ADQL user defined functions, helped with writing a proper standards text for EPN-TAP, and worked a bit on VODataService 1.2 (mainly STC coverage). We also started on SimpleDALRegExt 1.3 (essentially adding auxiliary capabilities). Also, we looked at existing implementations of TAP clients using authentication and will report on our findings at this Interop.

Thanks to the efforts of an international group of developers with major GAVO contributions, the current Debian release 10 ("buster") packages several VO client applications, including Aladin, TOPCAT, and pyVO, greatly facilitating the installation and maintenance on Debian and its derivatives.

Updates on what GAVO is doing are posted on a roughly monthly basis on https://blog.g-vo.org.

HVO

JVO

RVO

RVO_2019_report.pdf

SA^3

SVO

• SVO Data Centre
  • Development of pipelines to ingest science-ready data into the Calar Alto and GTC VO-compliant archives

• VO-science: 4 refereed papers including SVO staff.
  • The ssos pipeline: Identification of Solar System objects in astronomical images (2019A&C....2800289M)
  • Extended halo of NGC 2682 (M 67) from Gaia DR2 (2019A&A...627A.119C)
  • J-PLUS: Discovery and characterisation of ultracool dwarfs using Virtual Observatory tools (2019A&A...627A..29S).
  • The CARMENES search for exoplanets around M dwarfs. Different roads to radii and masses of the target stars (2019A&A...625A..68S) → Featured Science Publication in IVOA Newsletters

• Tools: VOSA
  • Ten new refereed papers using VOSA (since May 2019)
  • More than 500 new users have analysed ~ 1 000 000 objects in 2019.
• E&O
  • Development and maintenance of VO-compliant archives for the amateur community (e.g. https://sdc.cab.inta-csic.es/ObCP)

Vo-India

Vobs.it

• progressing on IVOA web assets consolidation: full switch of services to INAF-OATs expected to happen by end of 2019
  • it will include upgrade of services and sys-architecture improvements
  • it will help also with oncoming requests from TCG
• submitted a report to INAF Scientific Directorate to report on last years efforts and future perspectives and requests
  • INAF head is undergoing renewal, looking forward WRT how this impacts VObs.it
• waiting for a formal agreement for INAF & ASI for VObs.it involvement, currently this started only at technical level

Ukraine_VO

USVOA/SAO/CXC

Completed the Chandra Source Catalog production - CSC2.0 is planned for an October release. VO services including Simple cone search (Csc2scs), Simple image access protocol (Csc2siap), Table access protocol (Csc2tap) will also be released. An intuitive user interface utilizing WWT is also planned for released and is being demoed along with all of the interfaces to CSC2 at the Chandra Booth at ADASS.
A Focus demo at ADASS is planned titled: High Impact Data Availability using Community Standards and Tools - the Chandra Experience; High impact tools and products made available to the community with takeup of IVOA standards will be highlighted. 2 examples are HIPs products of our archive data that provide interactive visualization of Chandra images and use of WWT where we have added a customized layer to provide an interactive interface to the Chandra Source Catalog.
Continued support for the IVOA RofR operations - validation of Registries and implementation of actions from a telecon ealier this year were completed.
Wrapped up efforts on the Measurement & Coordinate Data Model and brought them to RFC on 9/13; the Transform mode is close behind

USVOA/NAVO

USVOA/LSST

• Took a lead in reinvigorating the development of pyvo within the Astropy community.
• Added auth support to pyvo suitable for LSST, CADC, and ESAC.
• Prototyped a SODA server written in Python.
• Worked with the new STC2 standards to investigate serialization forms. This has led to discovery of some issues with the proposed standards.

Report from the TCG

Recent meetings:

• Face-to-face meeting 2019-10-09
• Telecon 2019-08-22
• Telecon 2019-07-16

Five proposed reccommendations completed and submitted to Exec for approval

Four current proposed recommendations (all data models); 3 are in RFC review stage, 1 to be reviewed by TCG after document update

• concern expressed by some TCG members that DM recommendations are severely under-reviewed without concrete usage
• concern expressed by some TCG members that "two interoperable implementations" is very fuzzy when it comes to DMs
• proposal to "hold" new models until we can prove interoperability by completing the VODML-mapping work (from old utypes tiger team)

TCG has agreed that we will move the development of standards documents from volute (kindly hosted by GAVO) to github

• TCG chair/vice-chair will manage permissions and create repositories for standards (1 repository per document)
• WG chair/vice-chair will admin and manage permissions on a set of repositories (~10)
• WG chair/vice-chair and specified document editors will have write permission (to merge changes)
• details to be demonstrated at Sunday AM session
• TCG recommends that all documents be licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/) license: DocStd change

Report from the Working Groups

• IVOA_Code_of_Conduct_v0.6.pdf: IVOA_Code_of_Conduct_v0.6.pdf