The third day of the Stage 03 DSRP meeting in Sorrento is termed a Hack-a-thon. This is an opportunity for all the techies involved in the VOTech project or the partner efforts to work together on issues of integration or to learn about each others' developments in more detail. This page will contain ideas for that day.

On offer

Post offers to help people integrate your stuff into their stuff, offers to share your code base, or otherwise show people how to do stuff.

Who is offering	What?	Comments (time, duration, ...)
AlasdairAllan	VOEvent	There was a lot of interest shown in event related stuff at the recent AstroGrid Deployment Workshop. I've been working on this, and am a co-author on the current VOEvent standard document(s). If you want make an event feeds in VOEvent, or to plug your feed into the emerging VOEventNet? (we have a proto-standard for interoperability) then come talk to me and we'll sit down and sort it out. We also have RSS standards if you don't want to go all the out and push events over TCP sockets. -- AlasdairAllan - 27 Feb 2006
GuyRixon	CEA applications	I can help people to wrap applications in CEA. I have with me some pre-release code for the CEA app-server that makes the installation process easier.
...	...	...

How to use or How it works

Post requests here if you would like someone on another part of the project to explain to you in more detail how their tools or applications work:

Who is asking	For what	Comments (time, duration, ...)
John T	I wouldn't mind a quick hands-on demo of AstroNeural	1 hour
RichardHolbrey	To PaulHarrison (and ?): a CEA server for R, with remembered state/sessions	1 hour
MarkTaylor	An explanation of how to wrap command-line tools for CEA use - in particular I want to do it for the STILTS crossmatcher I'd be happy to attend such a "tutorial" as well-- ThomasBoch - 23 Feb 2006 I would attend also -- GarrySmith - 27 Feb 2006 This would also be of interest to me as well -- AlasdairAllan - 27 Feb 2006	2 hours??
ThomasBoch	Could someone from AstroGrid (maybe Noel ?) give me a demo of AstroScope. It looks interesting but I'm unable to use it properly. Would be good to get this demo'ed in DS4 reports: is someone from AG doing this? -- TonyLinde - 02 Mar 2006	1 hour
...	...	...

Integration work

If you'd like to integrate your tool into someone else's technology, please post the request here.

Who is asking	Your tool/app	To integrate into what other tool/app	Comments (time, duration, ...)
John T	ACR plastic hub module	VisIVO	Investigate messaging using polling. If we've already done that by then, we can move onto running a server on VisIVO
John T	Plastic	VOSpec with Pedro	...
FrancescoPierfederici	Server-side applications	ACR/ASR
ElizabethAuden	non-linear magnetic extrapolation algorithm	Garry's CEA access to clusters and Grid
ThomasBoch	Aladin	AG Workbench	The workbench offers an access (from the Apps module) to an outdated Aladin version. I'd like to discuss details with Noel so that the Workbench points to the Aladin beta version CDS will provide
BrunoRino	SSA Ranking prototype	Astroscope, ...	Devise effective ways to display a ranked votable
UgoBecciani , BjornLarsson	VisIVO	Astroneural	Visualization aspects

Any other ideas

Post here any other request of the Hack-a-thon day:

• I would like someone to help me create a WS-Resource compliant web service with Globus 4 if they already have experience with that -- PaulHarrison - 22 Feb 2006
  Hi Paul. I'm attending a course here at Ed which has a couple of practical sessions on Globus 4. It might be too basic for your needs, but if I can help, I will. -- JohnTaylor - 22 Feb 2006

• I would like to use part of this day to discuss about PLASTIC evolution with other people involved (John, Mark, Marco, ...) -- ThomasBoch - 22 Feb 2006
  I second that -- JohnTaylor - 22 Feb 2006
  third -- MarkTaylor

• I'd like to discuss with people working on tools/methods to query the IVOA registry/ies: who's developping? what is supported (in terms of specific registry, XML-DB, query languages)? which elements of the VOResource schemas are used? Compare usage and performances, and plan integration of different tools. -- SebastienDerriere
  Easiest way to do that, if it suits your needs, Sebastien, is to use the ACR and the XQuery interface to the AG Registry. Even I was able to create a Visual C# application which uses XML-RPC to get at the Registry XQuery interface. -- TonyLinde - 04 Mar 2006
  Yep, see presentation and example scripts for my XQuery in DS3PlanningStage03 - I'll go though this with you when convenient. -- NoelWinstanley - 07 Mar 2006

Accomplishments

Here it would be useful for people to contribute what they managed to accomplish in the sessions. So far, I have had very good feedback on the usefulness of the hack-a-thon:it'd be good to get an idea of what was achieved, not just as a justification for running the same session in Strasbourg, but also to help spark ideas in others.
-- TonyLinde - 09 Mar 2006

From FrancoisBonnarel - 08 Mar 2006

• I had discussions with A.Richards on characterisation Working draft
• I had some discussions with P.Osuna on ESAC services implementing SIA Extensions and on relationships between Characterisation Data Model and Catalog data model
• I had some discussions with F.Pierfederici about writing documentation for the new FootPrint description
• I had some discussions with AstroNeural people about communications between Aladin and Astroneural using Plastic and Aladin WebService
• I had some discussions with B.Rino and A.Wicenec about characterisation and Observation data model the latter needing a restart on instrumental and processing matters in a near future

From -- TonyLinde - 09 Mar 2006

• I helped Noel discover why his XQuery to discover Aladin services was not working (he did not realise the status of a resource defaulted to active and did not have to be explicitly marked as such).
• Mostly I was working on my own attempt to work out a single XQuery which would return a list of 'distinct-values' for a given element or attribute along with a count of the Resources within which they occurred (so, count of one for a resource which contains at least one such occurrence). See accumulating results (not yet formatted) here.

From -- BrunoRino - 09 Mar 2006

• Discussion with NoelWinstanley on using scores to differentiate hits on AstroScope. We'll have to folow up on it.
• ThomasBoch helped me to setup a filter in Aladin to display results in a score-aware fashion, and to fire up Aladin with both a votable and that filter already defined.
• ThomasBoch ended up creating a new shape function, the fixedcircle, that draws circles that don't scale up when zooming. This visualization proves very effective to look at scored items. Below are screenshots of zooming in:

From -- AlasdairAllan - 09 Mar 2006

• Discussions with Noel and John about Plastic and server side apps, very useful!
• Implemented proof-of-concept plastic client in Perl, after running into some Java/Perl incompatibilities (and uncovering a couple of bugs in the ACR) we seem to have now got this working.
• Discussions with Elizabeth about VOEvent

From - NoelWinstanley - 10 Mar 2006

• Discussed requirements and design of ASR with FrancescoPierfederici - arranged visit to ESO at end April to trial ASR
• Discussed with BrunoRino how to display ranked results in AstroScope - will follow up at same ESO visit.
• SebastienDerriere showed how to query registered Vizier tables as ConeSearch^? services - will add this into ConeSearch^? interface of ACR
• Resolved how to link to related VO-friendly applications with MarkTaylor and ThomasBoch
• Developed a design for a catalogue aggregator, based on the behaviour of AstroScope, with GiuseppeLongo . Will produce a design document for discussion.
• Collected feedback, fixmes, feature requests for ACR

From -- ThomasBoch - 16 Mar 2006

• Discussed with BrunoRino and explained him how to fire up Aladin with initial script commands. Also discussed about how "filters" worked.
• Those discussions led to the implementation of a new drawing function for filters, circles whose size are constant relative to the user's screen (see Bruno's screenshots above)
• Discussed with JohnTaylor and MarkTaylor about evolutions of PLASTIC
• Discussed with NoelWinstanley about how Aladin should be linked from AG Workbench
• Had a demo of AstroScope by NoelWinstanley
• PaulHarrison gave me an overview of CEA-wrapping of command-line tools