Northern Fall Interoperability Meeting Overview

Janet Evans, Marco Molinaro and Patrick Dowler

The Northern Spring Interop meeting was held May 25-28, 2021 via Zoom with 256 registered participants. New this year was a Newcomers session, and 2 Mini-Workshops. The Newcomers session was sponsored by the Education Interest Group and held on May 24 – the day before the opening of the Interop. Several scientific use cases were demoed using VO-standards and protocols. The aim was to help newcomers understand the structure of the IVOA and how Interop meetings are organized in order to get the most out of the upcoming meeting.

The first Mini-Workshop was on the use of Science Platforms for the dissemination of Cosmological Simulations. The workshop brought together scientists, experts in computational Cosmology, VO experts and SP developers who presented and discussed current implementations and ideas for their future development. The sessions were well attended with many contributions.

The second Mini-Workshop was on Data Model Usage in the VO. In January, a collaborative process was initiated to illustrate how the VO can use models to facilitate interoperability when accessing and analyzing data. The outcome of this work served as a basis for presentations and discussions during the Data Model workshop with a focus on time series and catalog data. Follow-on discussions have been ongoing since the workshop with efforts toward a final mapping syntax and development of a roadmap planned for conclusion this summer.

A community session was held on IVOA/Astropy/Astroquery/PyVO Collaborations where members of the IVOA, Astropy, and User community discussed topics and priorities for further joined priorities and efforts. Other sessions led by the IVOA Working and Interest Groups focused on core topics related to current Technical Coordination Group (TCG) efforts. Community led presentations provided a balance between contributed and core presentations. All sessions were recorded and available here.

The TCG thanks all outgoing members and particularly Pat Dowler who completed his term as TCG chair. We welcome all new committee members and we thank all who participated in the May Virtual Interop meeting. We also welcome you to participate in the efforts of the IVOA through the working group and interest group email & slack discussions and by engaging with the IVOA.

Here are several links to get involved:

“Python in Astronomy” training workshop

Boliang He

From 25 to 28 May, 2021, the Chinese Virtual Observatory (China-VO) hosted the “Python in Astronomy” training workshop for young astronomers. 30 graduate students from all over the country participated in the event. The training topics included fundamental of python, astronomical data, Virtual Observatory and AstroPy. Hands-on tutorials on photometric and spectral data processing were very welcomed by the participants.

First “ESCAPE Science with interoperable data” school

Enrique Solano, Miriam Cortés

Following the long tradition of VO schools organised by the Euro-VO initiative in the framework of different European projects (AIDA, 2008-2010; ICE, 2010-2012; CoSADIE, 2012-2015; and ASTERICS, 2015-2019) the ESCAPE project held its first VO school on 8-12, 19 February 2021. As in previous schools, the goal was twofold: to expose participants to the variety of VO tools and services so that they can use them efficiently for their own research, and to gather requirements and feedback from them. Participants were also introduced to the vision of the ESCAPE project, in particular to the new context of data sharing where the Virtual Observatory framework is being integrated into the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC).

The school was planned to be held in Madrid in May 2020. However, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, it was postponed and held on-line on February 2021 using Zoom and Slack as platforms.

During the school, VO experts gave hands-on sessions on the usage of VO tools and services using real life examples of scientific applications. These hands-on tutorials provided the starting point for participants to use the tools and services for their own science projects with the benefit of the expertise of the tutors.The hands-on tutorials and the more advanced presentations were aimed at addressing the needs of the participants based on the information they provided during the registration. The last day was dedicated to the participants own science cases, applying what they had learnt earlier in the week.

The school was the first experience for many of the partners to run a high-level-interactive event in an on-line setting. Nevertheless, this challenging situation did not prevent the school from running very smoothly and in a perfect “virtual” atmosphere. The meeting was a success, with a great atmosphere favouring a lot of exchanges and discussions. 93% of the participants rated the school as “very good” or “excellent” while 100% of the participants foresee using VO-tools in their future research.

More information on the school can be found here.

NAVO Workshop “Accessing NASA’s Astrophysics Archives using Python”

Bruce Berriman

During the summer meeting of the American Astronomical Society, held June 7-11 2021, the NASA Astronomical Virtual Observatories (NAVO) hosted a workshop titled “Accessing NASA’s Astrophysics Archives using Python”. The workshop described several use cases that involved discovery and access of data across NASA VO-compliant images.

The Python notebooks developed for the workshop are available here and a webinar recording of the session is here.

TAP Service at the NASA Exoplanet Archive

Bruce Berriman

The NASA Exoplanet Archive, operated by the NASA Exoplanet Science Institute at IPAC, has over the past 18 months redesigned its infrastructure to make the data more standardized, easier to access, more complete, and better reflect the scientific progress of the field of exoplanetary astrophysics. As part of this effort, the Exoplanet Archive released new and more comprehensive tables that were underpinned by Python-based nexsciTAP server (https://github.com/Caltech-IPAC/nexsciTAP). With the release of the new tables atop the new TAP services in 2020, the NASA Exoplanet Archive saw a noticeable increase in access of the tables by the community. The NASA Exoplanet Archive is now in the process of making all its tables TAP compliant.

VO standards-based Metadata Management and Data Submission System of NADC

Yihan Tao

The National Astronomical Data Center (NADC) of China has developed a metadata management and data submission system. Data preservation for research project is one of the major responsibilities for NADC.The system is aimed at supporting the data submission process of astronomical projects, including the submission and review of metadata and data. With the system, data administrators can also curate a published data catalogue and manage the metadata. The metadata standard employed in the system is consistent with and extended from the VO standards-Resource Metadata for the Virtual Observatory Version 1.12 and IVOA Observation Data Model Core Components and its Implementation in the Table Access Protocol. In order to describe and filter the dataset by types, a multifaceted taxonomy of waveband, telescope/project, subject, data product type, production age, process level, content type and content level is adopted in the system and displayed as tags.