IVOA IAU Liaison Committee

Purpose

The International Astronomical Union (IAU) promotes research, communication, education and development in astronomy, through international cooperation. The IVOA has been engaging with the IAU to support the broad astronomical goals of the IAU, and to promote the value of IVOA activities to the IAU and the astronomy community. So far, a functional working group on the Virtual Observatory has been established within Division B (Facilities, Technology and Data Science), of the IAU; an MoU has been signed between the IVOA and the IAU Office of Astronomy for Development to support its activities. IVOA members gave presentations at sessions of the IAU General Assembly in August 2022 and supported the organization of the Division B meeting at the General Assembly. The purpose of this group, the IVOA-IAU Liaison Group (IILG), is to provide future coordination of these activities.

Membership

Chair: Bruce Berriman

Charter

The charter of the IVOA-IAU Liaison Committee is available here.

Activities

IAU General Assembly 2024

• Mark Allen (CDS) and Bruce Berriman (USVOA/NAVO) were co-organizers of a Division B: Parallel Session 3B meeting entitled "Community Engagement , Open Science and the Virtual Observatory." There were six presentations in this session:
  • Introduction to the Virtual Observatory and the Goals of the Meeting - Mark Allen (CDS)
  • The VO and Education: Data accessibility in developing nations and access by underprivileged groups within developed nations (Priya Shah, Maulana Azad National Urdu University, Hyderabad)
  • Enabling Future Breakthroughs in Time-Domain and Multi-Messenger Astronomy (Brad Cenko, NASA/GSFC)
  • Big Data and Open Science and Engagement in Radio Astronomy (Russ Taylor, University of Cape Town University of the Western Cape)
  • The VO, FAIR Principles and Open Science (Bruce Berriman, Caltech/IPAC)
  • Scalable visualization of large distributed data sets enabled by Virtual Observatory standards and tools (Mark Allen, Strasbourg astronomical observatory)

The talks can be found at https://zenodo.org/records/13550169. ( 10.5281/zenodo.13550168)

• Bruce Berriman gave an invited presentation "The Benefits of the Virtual Observatory to Underserved Communities" as part of Focus Meeting-1, Part Harnessing ground-based optical telescopes. The presentation can be found at https://zenodo.org/records/13381868 ( 10.5281/zenodo.13381867). A paper has been accepted for publication in the "Transactions of the IAU." The paper can be found at https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.07973.
• An interactive side session led by CDS entitled "Virtual Observatory Tools for Students and Educators in Africa" was presented by

  Mark Allen, Matthieu Baumann, Manon Marchand , Pooja Sharma (Strasbourg astronomical Data Centre, CDS), Priya Hasan (Maulana Azad National Urdu University Gachibowli, Hyderabad), and Bruce Berriman (Caltech/IPAC-NExScI) with the support of Patricia Whitelock (South African Astronomical Observatory and University of Cape Town). The aim of the workshop was toto enable the participants to discover and use openly available data for their research projects and educational activities.

IAU General Assembly 2022

• Bruce Berriman was co-chair of the Division meetings, and gave two presentations

  • "Enabling Science with Virtual Observatory,” at the Division B Facilities, Technologies and Data Science meeting, and

  • "FAIR principles in IVOA,” at the Division B Laboratory Astrophysics commission meeting.

• Berriman also gave a presentation at the "Executive Committee Working Group : global coordination of ground and space" meeting entitled "Future Role of Archives: IVOA perspective."
• All the slides are accessible at https://zenodo.org/records/15127127( 10.5281/zenodo.15127126).
• IVOA members were authors on two papers resulting from the Division B meeting

  • Dubernet ML, Berriman GB, Boersma C, et al. Laboratory Astrophysics Data Working Group IAU 2022 GA session. Proceedings of the International Astronomical Union. 2022;18(S371):43-48. https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S1743921323000327 (doi:10.1017/S1743921323000327)

  • Dubernet ML, Berriman GB, Barklem P, et al. Atomic and Molecular Databases Open Science for a sustainable world. Proceedings of the International Astronomical Union. 2022;18(S371):72-84. https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S1743921323000261 (doi:10.1017/S174392132300)

VO Working Group Triennial Report 2025

Annual_Report_of_the_VO_Functional_Working_Group.pdf