[News] Notes on ((G)A)VO - meeting at OmegaCEN

[Edwin A. Valentijn]

Notes on ((G)A)VO meeting at OmegaCEN - Kapteyn Institute Groningen 6-7 
May 2004
Edwin Valentijn
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

On 6/7 May a meeting was organized with designers of AVO, GAVO, 
AstroGRID, Lofar and Astro-Wise.

The programme of the meeting, list of attendants and most presentations 
can be found on the Agenda pages of the Astro-Wise web site - 
www.astro-wise.org

One of the purposes of the meeting was to review how the AstroWise 
system could  serve the VO world and vice versa.
This meeting is a first step.
The frank exchanges at the meeting served this purpose very much. Each 
group  presented  status and plans for  the near future. This was 
extremely useful.
Given the "intermediate" phase of each of the projects,  it becomes 
clear what can be achieved in the near future.

AstroWise showed its current implementation of user tuned pipeline 
services  and archive services. Also, an experimental prototype of a 
full web interface to the Oracle AstroWise archive was demonstrated.

AstroGrid explained their 3-month design and implementation cycle, focus 
on webservices  and the design of their system - See Tony Linde's .ppt.
AstroWise pipelines might be too complex to run in the 
webservices/MySpace environment.
GAVO and AVO presentations are also posted on the astro-wise web site.

A few plans to further explore  future collaborations were made:

- a test project interfacing AstroWise to VO environment will be explored;
the test project will employ WFI at 2.2m images and source catalogues 
(Sextractor output)
 
- GAVO and AstroWise (or their representatives) will attend the AVO- SWG 
meeting 10-11 June in Strassbourg. It will be explored whether/how the 
test project could
relate to the planned AVO demos to be discussed at this meeting.

- GAVO and Awe will make a preliminary design of a simple (Step I) 
implementation of VO interfacing the AstroWise system, keeping in mind 
that we want to evolve to the more advance implementations II) and III).
(GAVO will prepare a Draft write-up.)

I) --- simple: externally Associate AstroWise published VOTs with ROSAT, 
SLOAN and XMM datasets

II) --- more advanced: facilitate webservices to run AstroWise 
Sassociate tool to internallly associate AstroWise catalogues. Link 
these internal AstroWise associations to external VOTs as addressed in I).

III)--- very advanced: facilitate full AstroWise services under VO 
environment; ie run user tuned pipelines.

Note, that AstroWise is already very far with III) in stand-alone 
environment (operate user tunable pipelines=Objectmaker and webservices 
to database =ObjectViewer)  and it will be particularly challenging  
which layers of VO and AstroWise to adopt.    
 
- In the week 14-18 June  GAVO, AVO and AstroWise will  contact (either 
EV in Garching or by phone) to discuss next steps.

- OmegaCEN will coordinate with Lofar when applicable. 


-- 
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Edwin A. Valentijn
Head OmegaCEN                       www   : www.astro.rug.nl/omegacen
Kapteyn Astronomical Institute      tel   : +31 (0)50 3634011
P.O.Box 800                         mobile: +31 (0)6 48276416
NL-9700 AV Groningen                e-mail: valentyn at astro.rug.nl
The Netherlands                     www   : www.astro.rug.nl/~valentyn
----------------------------------------------------------------------