A1D6.2
Name: Virtual Observatory Action Plan
Lead Beneficiary: ROB
Beneficiaries involved: ROB, UNIGRAZ, OBSPARIS and other institutes as users
Due Date: Month 6 (May 2009)
Contents |
Goal
The main objective is to produce a techical report containing a data inventory of the SOTERIA datasets, a review of existing VO-technologies and an implementation plan to collectively transition to a chosen VO.
Progress so far
ROB, OBSPARIS and UNIGRAZ (David Berghmans, Wolfgang Otruba, Jean Abourdaham)
- on Jan 30 2009, a meeting at ROB was held with representatives from OBSPARIS and UNIGRAZ.
ALL
- a Data Inventory was produced of all SOTERIA data that we want to take into account for the Virtual Observatory action plan.
- a broad consortium discussion was held at the Lapland meeting
ROB (Benoit Callebaut, David Berghmans)
- the available documentation as well as the present status of various Virtual Observatories (VO) was studied in detail, including EGSO, VSO, CESAR, BASS2000 and others.
- as a test-case, ROB has installed the VSO data provided interface (SOAP) for accessing its data from the ground-based USET telescopes. Some experiments with the VSO server interface have also been conducted. Compliance tests of the VSO data provider for USET data is in progress with the VSO group
- the final editing of the VO action plan has been started and is foreseen to be delivered before the end of November 2009.
Problem areas
- As a general conclusion, it was observed that the publicly available documentation is insufficient to assess the technical details of how the VOs work. Specifically, it is very hard to asses for us which resources & effort it would take to the SOTERIA consortium to join a VO. The answers on our technical questions that we posed to the VOs were in general of a poor quality and timeliness. We believe that the VOs typically work in an underfunded regime, with short funding horizons for which the required IT personnel cannot be stabilized.
- We thus concluded that it is NOT possible, as was foreseen in the proposal, to join an existing VO by simply adapting the existing SOTERIA data archives to the existing VO standards and technology.
- These problems resulted in a delay of the present deliverable (the VO action plan).
Suggestions for spin-off, collaboration or improvement
The above problem will be addressed along two lines of attack:
1. In the coming months: start by adapting and extending the American "Virtual Solar Observatory" named herafter VSO. This means that all SOTERIA members with a data archive would become, in time, VSO data providers. Meanwhile at ROB we are making sure that we do not depend critically on the central VSO hub, but that SOTERIA has its own central hub that can work independently from it. VSO has the advantage that it is simple, it is up-and-running, and some of us (OBSPARIS) are already in there.
2. On a slower timescale: interact as much as possible with the HELIO consortium (successor of EGSO) and make sure that in the long run we are fully compatible with them. HELIO has the advantage that it is an FP7 project also (European based), that they are developing a state-of-the-art system far beyond VSO, and that they need a user community like SOTERIA to interact with.
