From the proposal...

Project Summary

A Design Study will be undertaken aimed at completing all technical preparatory work necessary for the construction of the European Virtual Observatory (EuroVO). The concept of the Virtual Observatory (VObs) is that all the world's data should feel like it sits on the astronomer's desk top, analysable with a user selected workbench of tools, made available through a standard interface. Internationally this is set to transform and re-structure the way astronomy is done. EuroVO is a specifically European implementation of this idea, and will produce a world leading infrastructure providing a unified virtual data resource and the ability to peform complex data discovery and manipulation tasks across the whole range of astronomy. Access to data and tools will be equally good across Europe, regardless of location. This will require establishing an alliance of data centres, and a VObs facility centre in support of the community, but crucially requires the construction of an infrastructural glue of software components, in the context of rapidly evolving background developments in IT and the grid.

The VO-TECH project aims specifically at feasibility studies and design work aimed at integrating such new technologies into the EuroVO. Key IT advances to build on are in intelligent resource discovery (ontology and the semantic web), data mining, and visualisation capabilities. These will be integrated via global astronomical interoperability standards coupled with the latest distributed grid computing services. Additionally this project covers design and preparatory work to ensure that data from the major european telescopes and facilities (as represented by the Opticon and RadioNet networks) is fully accessible through the EuroVO, and where required, is able to offload mass scale computational process onto the EGEE backbone.

In summary, VO-TECH will lay the technical foundations of the EuroVO, a European infrastructure to revolutionise the scientific process

Project Objectives

The top-level objective of the VO-TECH proposal is to complete all technical preparatory work necessary for the construction of the European Virtual Observatory.

Figure 1: Click to see image full size

Context Figure 1 shows the conceptual structure of VO-TECH, and how it relates to EuroVO as a whole, the various classes of user, and the general astronomical infrastructure.

The VO-TECH preparatory work needs to link closely with the work of the Data Centre Alliance (DCA) and VO Facility Centre (VOFC), with the final construction of EuroVO following the VO-TECH design study kept in mind. The work also takes place in the context of extensive developments - new algorithms, technologies, and protocols - in academic and commercial IT, and especially of course in generic grid middleware. This work will not be repeated. The job needed is to assess these developments and design astronomy-specific modules based on them. The working links of the project partners with this external world are excellent. Several of the VO-TECH partners have active working relationships with the academic and commercial IT communities, and the project will work with EGEE as an exemplar application area. It is also worth noting that Astronomy in general and the VObs projects in particular have attracted attention as leading edge but pragmatic exemplars of the new e-science approach - for example some of the VO-TECH co-Is have been invited to talk at Bio-Informatics meetings, as well as general Grid meetings.

Objectives of Project:

1. To assess new technologies and study the feasibility of their incorporation in EuroVO
2. To create designs of new infrastructure components based on those new technologies
3. To create designs of science user tools and datamining services
4. To develop trial versions of new infrastructure components, tools, and datamining services and to test them
5. To decide what new interoperability standards are required, and to define those standards with international partners
6. To liaise with the larger EuroVO structure, gaining refreshed versions of science functionality and architecture, and feeding back component test results, designs, and trial components for demonstration suites.
7. To liaise with computer science, IT industry, and related applications projects in order to mesh with larger standards and to save work wherever possible

Work Description