IVOA Executive Committee Meeting (TM22)

Thurs Mar 8 2007 @ 15.00-16.30 GMT

Logistics

Telecon:

Agenda

1. Roll Call and Agenda
2. Minutes of TM21
3. Review of Actions
4. Approval of new IVOA Recommendation(s) [Standing Item]
5. Status of the IVOA assessment (FG/DDY)
6. WG/IG/Standardisation process: RW to report on
   • Recommendation process
   • Nominations for vice chairs: DAL, others (DM?, Apps?)
   • Status report on Apps WG, SSA, SIA, VOQL, Characterisation
   • Preparation of the yearly TCG Coordinator report (due for May 2007 Interop)
7. Preparation of the review of the WG/IG chairs (due for May 2007 Interop) (FG/DDY/RW)
8. Status of the Assessment of Implementation of IVOA standards in Data Centres (DS/CA)
9. Status of the preparation of the Beijing Interoperability meeting (CC)
10. Status of the preparation of the Fall (2007) Interop meeting (NW)
11. Date and Venue of the next Exec meeting (Beijing)
12. AOB
13. Summary of Actions

Reports from the Projects

ArVO

AstroGrid

Australia-VO

China-VO

CVO

VObs.it (aka DRACO) Italy

Euro-VO

France VO

GAVO

HVO

Japan-VO

Korean VO

NVO

The NVO development project moved into sixth year thanks to supplemental funding from the NSF. The continuation funding allows us to maintain key technology and infrastructure efforts.

A major effort in this quarter has been the preparation of a book describing the core technologies and science capabilities of the Virtual Observatory. The content for the book is being drawn primarily, though not exclusively, from the NVO Summer School lectures and tutorials. The book is intended to function as a handbook for scientists interested in utilizing the VO in their research and for technically-oriented astronomers and programmers wanting to develop their own VO applications and services. The book will be published by the Astronomical Society of the Pacific as part of their conference proceedings series.

Progress was made on the Simple Spectrum Access Protocol (SSAP) and associated spectral data model, and test interfaces and software were developed that validate the SSAP and spectral DM specifications. NVO staff collaborated with an IVOA-constituted tiger team that is charged with simplifying and finalizing the Astronomy Data Query Language (ADQL) and developing a standard Table Access Protocol (TAP). This work is intended to make it easier for catalog and database providers to publish their holdings, and to decouple standard database queries from the more complicated cross-matching functions that are part of the SkyNode specification.

The VOEvent protocol, whose development was spearheaded by the NVO, was endorsed as an IVOA Recommendation. Work is in progress to broaden the use of VOEvent in the gamma-ray burst research community.

End-user experiences with the NVO web site led us to rethink the primary data discovery portal. An NVO tiger team was formed to define the requirements for a new portal and to develop prototype interfaces. Our goal is to release a new, easy-to-use data discovery tool in conjunction with the May 2007 AAS meeting.

A full report on recent activities is available at http://www.us-vo.org/pubs/files/FY07Q1.pdf.

RVO

SVO

VO-India

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

Applications WG

Data Access Layer WG

Data Models WG

Grid and Web Services Working Group

Registry WG

Semantics/UCD WG

VOEvent

VOQL WG

The feedback summary report is given here.

The VOQL-TEG has celebrated three meetings so far:

VOQL-TEG Meeting #1 on Oct 10 2006
VOQL-TEG Meeting #2 on Nov 16 2006
VOQL-TEG Meeting #3 on Jan 29 2007

The minutes of the meetings can be found at:

http://www.ivoa.net/forum/voql-teg/0610/0009.htm
http://www.ivoa.net/forum/voql-teg/0611/0033.htm
http://www.ivoa.net/forum/voql-teg/0702/0058.htm

respectively.

A summary of the main decision to separate Language, Access and Specification can be found at the VOQL pages at:

http://www.ivoa.net/twiki/bin/view/IVOA/IvoaVOQL

As one of the first actions, a new refurbished ADQL document has been created to serve as a starting point for internal discussions. The document can be seen at:

http://www.ivoa.net/internal/IVOA/IvoaVOQL/ADQL-20070126.pdf

that you can see at the bottom of page:

http://www.ivoa.net/twiki/bin/view/IVOA/IvoaVOQL

All the discussions that have taken place so far within the VOQL-TEG can be found at:

http://www.ivoa.net/forum/voql-teg/

VOTable WG

Astro-RG IG

Data Curation and Preservation IG

Theory IG

-- NicholasWalton - 19 Feb 2007