VotcSTPlanningstage02

Telecon: 26 Jul 2005 @ 09.00 GMT

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Present:

Agenda

1. Review of Actions
2. Science in Stage 01: progress check
   • DS3 (AR)
   • DS4 (AW)
   • DS5 (MA)
   • DS6 (GL)
3. Towards a Science Framework Document
4. 'Stage One' Implementation Plans - science for 2006.
5. 'Stage Two' priorities
6. AOB

Notes

1. Review of Actions

VST-TM1-3 ACTION - NW - need to list astronomy conferences to target - aim some exemplar science releases at specific high profile astro conferences.

CLOSED: see VotcSciConfs - this has list of a number of relevant conferences for 2005/6.

VST-TM1-4 ACTION - NW - check on timescales for the various upcoming science/VO meetings, and issue some preliminary ideas as to exemplar science ideas and where and when these should be released (and to who).

CLOSED: see VotcSciConfs - it was AGREED that there should be a VOTC science paper at ADASSXV describing the project from the science exploitation of the Euro-VO side. NW to compose draft and circulate by Jul 28 2005 - submission deadline is 1 Aug.

VST-TM1-5 ACTION - AR - start analysis of SRM - put up a wiki page for this.

ONGOING: - see ScienceReferenceMissionRequirements - AR to annotate this with an indication of DS area against requirement.

VST TM2-1 ACTION: Update from different technical groups about what the current progress for next telecon.

CLOSED: update at this telecon.

2. Science in Stage 01: progress check

2.1 DS3: Infrastructure (AR)

AR noted that the list of DS3 plans are at DS3 Stage01 Plans. It was noted that most actions are running late.

2.2 DS4: Tools (AW)

AW noted that the reporting on the twiki was behind - but that there was significant DS4 activity.

• Test of SAADA tool to allow insertion of info into VO compliant databases. First indications are that this tool would require significant adaptation to be useful to the VO at this stage
• Footprint tool - has a requirements and specifications page
• Cross match tool has a new requirements page - the aim will be check the specs of existing cross match tools against this list of requirements.
  • ACTION VST TM3-1 AW check the status of the web service acces to the CDS x-match tool
• ESO have now a functioning VOStore

2.3 DS5: Resource Discovery (MA)

• No report received.
• Issue of importance of improvements to the search interface of the existing VO regsitries.

2.4 DS6: Data Mining (GL)

From GL:

'this is a short summary of what is taking place in the DS6 WG as I could reconstruct from the information kindly provided by Bob Mann. A general consideration is that activity has beenplagued by the delays in the funding. Dedicated contracts have just started.

1. ITALY: Catania-INAF/Bologna-CINECA have implemented a web-service based version of the visualization tool VISIVO which allows querying and downloading of data and of auxiliary information from the CDS. Napoli-University has implemented the interface between the software AstroNeural for data mining and VISIVO. The three units are working on a prototype of a scientific application which vcan be summarized as follows:
   1. querying of SDSS archive and visualization of data for pre analysis. Clustering of the accepted data and derivation of photometric redshifts.
   2. Interactive selection of aberrant points using WEB-service at CDS and visualization of thumbnails. The package already works and can be transformed into a demo well before the end of September. Contracts will start at the end of September in CT and in January in Napoli. In the meanwhile DS6 efforts are financed through local funds.
2. FRANCE: CDS is interacting with many of the other institutes providing support and know-how. For instance they have interacted with Catania/Bologna to develop the interfaces with VISIVO. Not much else has been reported so far.
3. UK
   1. Exeter. No VOTECH-funded effort there. It is not clear whether the eSTAR agents group will get involved in DS6 or not.
   2. Leicester. Clive Page was funded for one year of VOTECH, and expected mainly to be involved in DS6. He had started discussing with Mark Taylor (Bristol) about how to extend the TOPCAT tool for manipulating tabular data to use column-ordered storage, but this work has stopped, as Clive has been moved off VOTECH, to work on XMM stuff at Leicester.
   3. Portsmouth. Garry Smith is funded 100% to work on DS6. He has been developing a broker system whereby VO users can employ Grid resources to run large numbers of separable jobs. His prototype for this has been an N-point correlation function code from Bob Nichol, but the intention is that this can approach can be applied to many compute-intensive data analysis tasks. Garry had started by working with the Condor job management system for clusters, and its interface to the Globus Toolkit for Grid resources, but he has reverted to his initial idea, of a pluggable architecture for the broker, so that a variety of resources can be addressed in what to the user appears the same way.
   4. Leeds. Richard Holbrey has been appointed to a post working on visualization. He only started a couple of months ago, so most of his work to date has been induction - e.g. attending the Euro-VO and AstroGrid workshops - but he is also developing a list of existing visualization packages for the DS6 Software Survey.
   5. Edinburgh. John Taylor is VOTECH-funded here. His main task so far has been to draft a document describing what it means to VO-enable an existing tool, and how you'd go about doing it. He has a nearly complete draft of that now, and I hope to be able to circulate that to the rest of the DS6 team before the end of August.
   6. In September there will also be the official start of the work of the Science Validation Team (Mann, Nichols and myself).

Giuseppe Longo (with the help of R. Mann)'

GL noted that stronger interactions specifically bewteen DS4 and DS6 areas could help.

AstroNeural is a clustering algorithm - it can be applied to a large range of astrophysical problems.

ACTION VST TM3-2 GL: circulate fuller description of AstroNeural capabalities to the VOTC science team.

2.5 ESAC

ACTION VST TM3-3 NW: in future add an agenda item to allow input of science priorities from ESAC/ESAVO.

3. Towards a Science Framework Document

This will now be drafted on-line at VotcSFD. With the re-phasing of the stages - such that stage 2 now starts Oct 05 rather than Jul 05 - the SFD will be released Dec 2005.

NW: reported that he will email updates on progress - input welcome.

4.'Stage One' Implementation Plans - science for 2006.

4.1 Overview

Exploit DS4/DS6 tools.

Aim will be to develop two or three science themes, where use of existing or to be shortly developed capabilities, implemntations can help solve the science problem. Aim for initial results Mar/Apr 2006, with contributions at the science level for the Aug 2006 IAU special session.

GL: working on an equivalent of sextractor on distributed data. This tool may be available for use over the year.

MG: noted that the science themes should link to the AVO SRM cases at some level.

GL: noted the possible relevance of the upcoming VST-16 survey

MG: noted that a key ESAC science priortity would involve exploitation of the 1/2XMM serendipitous catalogues.

AW: the ESO archive group are now registering into the VO ESO data products. UVES will be the first reduced data product set. This could be accessed via the SSAP. Also GOODS and EIS data sets will become visible through the VO registry. Also HARPS reduced data could be available quickly.

NW: Possible galactic structure case, as a precurosr to GAIA could be relevant.

4.2 Synthesis of DS area implementations for 2006 Science

ACTION NW/ALL Science theme pages.

5. 'Stage Two' priorities

Planning meeting 14-16 Sep 2005, with Stage 2 TAP 28+29 Sep 2005. Thus need to firm up science prioities before this via email.

Main issue will be deciding on alterations to priorities based on needed development for 2006 science themes.

6. AOB

AGREED: Next telecon Fri 2 Sep 2005 at 09.00GMT