• ArchivesAndVirtualObservatoriesForum

Welcome to the Radio-Net Archives and Virtual Observatories Software Forum

News

AstroGrid Science Workshop and RadioNet/AstroGrid workshop for radio data providers

Oxford 4-8 December 2006

Registration deadline 3 November or when full

Please sign up / contact radiovo@jb.man.ac.uk now to request or comment on topics you want to see addressed in this hands-on workshop

Deliverables for this Forum, written in Radio-Net Contract, Oct 2003

(http://www.radionet-eu.org/documents/misc/WorkProgramme.pdf 8.N5.3 Table N5.2)

• Recommend a common approach for radio observatories to join IVO.
  

Comment: Would be best interpreted as encouraging radio data providers to engage in national and international VO activities and contribute to developing IVOA standards - ongoing.

• Report on architecture and user requirements for pipeline calibration and reduction as well as web-based archive access.
  

Suggested goals for 2006

• Update report on status of RadioNet participating organsations' archives and access.

• Update report on current use of pipelined calibration and other editing and data reduction and how this could be used to produce VO-accessible data and/or run on-demand via VO interfaces.
• Update capabilities of VO for pubishing radio data - present status and plans.
• Investigate user requirements: So far, we have relied on archive workers' perceptions of what their users want. Can we reach users (including non-radio astronomers) directly to capture/prioritise requirements? Or use web statistics?
• Discuss how to cope with the large volume of some inteferometry datasets, including visibility data and cubes:
  • What data volumes can reasonably be shipped to users, by what methods?
  • What alternatives are there, e.g. cutouts, automated processing? (etc.).

Changes/comments welcome

Anita Richards 13 Jan 2006 incorporating suggestion from Tom Oosterloo 16 Jan 2006

On the topic of user requirements (the 4th bullet above), we have collected a pretty good set of requirements for EVLA archive capability, which can be found as section 4 of the document at: http://www.aoc.nrao.edu/evla/techdocs/computer/workdocs/evla_requirements_15apr03.pdf

This might be of some interest to you all. Of course you'll want to update/modify it, but the list (including the prioritization) might be a starting point. The VO section is light - we have a separate document written by Doug Tody outlining the vision of potential VO support at NRAO.

ALMA has similar requirements, but they are less detailed (IMHO).

Bryan Butler 21 Feb 2006 (copy of email of 15 Feb 2006)

Milestones for the 18 Months 2004 Jan to 2005 June

Recommend a common approach for radio observatories to join IVO.

1 RADIO OBSERVATORIES AND VIRTUAL OBSERVATORIES

• 1.1 Radio-Net participants

  • 1.1.1 Establish the range of archives covered by members of the group, and any omissions. done; see report below; may be added to at any time

    1.1.2 Establish the present state of archive access, development plans and VO involvement, building on the IVOA (International Virtual Observatory Alliance) radiovo questionnaire. done, see below

  1.2 Involvement in VOs

  • 1.2.1 Publicise IVOA discussions about relevant standards under discussion or adopted by the IVOA, the existence of regional VOs and how to become involved. done; see links in references below

    1.2.1 Create a formal link with the AVO and identify areas for close cooperation. done awaiting Euro-VO developments

  1.3 Publishing data and resources via VOs

  • 1.3.1 Identify the present capabilities of VOs and VO-linked facilities e.g. CDS, for publishing radio data or data manipulation tools. done

    1.3.2 Identify radio archives suitable for publication and the amount of effort needed to make resources or data available. ongoing, see reports below (e.g. SCUBA point sources, single dish spectra)

    1.3.3 Establish a timetable for making suitable resources VO-accessible within the lifetime of this project. needs further discussion

  1.4 Publishing non-archive and tabular radio data

  • 1.4.1 Investigate accessibility of data from refereed journals e.g. via SIMBAD and Vizier and any assistance we could give. ongoing; see e.g. SPECFIND Catalog of radio continuum spectra (Vollmer, 2004)

    1.4.2 Identify other major collections and if we can help improve accessibility. needs further discussion

Report on architecture and user requirements for pipeline calibration and reduction as well as web-based archive access.

• 2.1 Current mechanisms for automated/standardised data reduction, remote delivery of data/software access etc. and data formats.

  • 2.1.1 Establish current practices and plans as in 1.1 above. done; see report below may be added to as needed

    2.1.2 Investigate software tools/packages and data formats/types for interoperability and ease of use, including user feedback. liaise with other RadioNet WGs

  2.2 Localised v. common methods

  • 2.2.1 Identify what processes are specific to a particular data-type or to one or a few facilities. Investigate at what stage users acquire data and if this can be made more convenient such as via VO access to specialised local software ongoing

  In this and other areas there will be a variety of demands and any recommendations should be flexible in order to cater to users who want to access data at different stages of processing and facilities with different access restrictions. 2.3 Data Comparison (including with resources partly outwith Radio-Net partners and with non-radio data)

  • 2.3.1 Investigate existing projects combining radio data sets e.g. MIGALE-HIPASS, how we can assist these and potential future projects. see reports below

    2.3.2 Identify issues hampering interoperability and how we can help overcome these. needs further discussion

  2.4 Data Centres

  • 2.4.1 Investigate existing plans for radio data centres covering more than one facility and the relationship with processes identified in 1.2 previous sub-sections. ongoing

3 Liaison with other Radio-Net Software Forum groups, especially Synergy and ALMA ongoing, see e.g. CommonProposalTool meeting report

References:

International Virtual Observatory Alliance http://www.ivoa.net/ - see internal site, especially

http://www.ivoa.net/forum/index.html including www.ivoa.net/forum/radiovo/ to which we should contribute! This contains the responses to a questionnaire sent to radio observatories last year about their archive practices and VO plans.

Peter Lamb (CSIRO) is coordinating the development of a radio interferometry data model for the IVOA; so far the most advanced include his ATCA model and the ALMA model.

Past Emails

Post an Email

Reports

IVOA Interoperability meeting May 2004 Boston, Ma.:
Data Access Layer (see presentation by Richards and Tody summary for more radio-relevant)
Data Models (for radio see presentations by Lamb and by Richards)

Summary of responses to radio data providers questionnaire

links to radio data models These will be updated following the IVOA meeting May 2004

SingleDishArchives Report of meeting held at JBO on 13-14 Jan 2005 SingleDishArchives & PresentationsLink

VOTech has a number of relevant aspects including developing a structured data description language, we can feed in science use cases and ontology requirements for extraction of images etc. from visibility data as mentioned at Intelligent resource discovery workpackage meeting

We should also consider what radio data could be used in Euro-VO science reference missions

Data Models

See IVOA links above and ALMA data model: talk by Francois Viallefond; most complete and recent ALMA models (see ALMA pages for most recent).

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