International Virtual Observatory Alliance

Last updated

The International Virtual Observatory Alliance (IVOA) [1] is a worldwide scientific organisation formed in June 2002. Its mission is to facilitate international coordination and collaboration necessary for enabling global and integrated access to data gathered by astronomical observatories. An information system allowing such an access is called a virtual observatory . The main task of the organisation so far has focused on defining standards to ensure interoperability of the different virtual observatory projects already existing or in development.

Contents

The IVOA now comprises 19 VO projects from Argentina, Armenia, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Europe, France, Germany, Hungary, India, Italy, Japan, Korea, Russia, Spain, Ukraine, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Membership is open to other national and international projects according to the IVOA Guidelines for Participation.

Senior representatives from each national VObs project form the IVOA Executive Committee. A chair is chosen from among the representatives and serves a 1.5 year term, preceded by a 1.5 year term as deputy chair. The Executive Committee meets 3-4 times a year to discuss goals, priorities, and strategies.

Members

IVOA currently brings together nineteen member organisations, both national and international :

  1. Argentina Virtual Observatory
  2. Armenian Virtual Observatory
  3. AstroGrid UK
  4. Australian Virtual Observatory
  5. Brazilian Virtual Observatory
  6. Chinese Virtual Observatory
  7. Chilean Virtual Observatory
  8. Canadian Virtual Observatory - ChiVO
  9. European Space Agency
  10. European Virtual Observatory - Euro-VO
  11. German Astrophysical Virtual Observatory
  12. Hungarian Virtual Observatory
  13. Italian Virtual Observatory
  14. Japanese Virtual Observatory
  15. National Virtual Observatory (USA)
  16. Observatoire Virtuel France
  17. Russian Virtual Observatory
  18. Spanish Virtual Observatory
  19. Ukrainian Virtual Observatory
  20. Virtual Observatory India

Working Groups

The tasks of the IVOA are distributed over different working groups:

Applications

The IVOA Applications Working Group is concerned primarily with the software tools that Astronomers use to access VO data and services for doing Astronomy. The role of the Applications Working Group is to:

Data Access Layer

The task of the Data Access Layer (DAL) working group is to define and formulate VO standards for remote data access. Client data analysis software will use these services to access data via the VO framework; data providers will implement these services to publish data to the VO.

The DAL working groups has defined various standards for accessing data sets, in particular images (Simple Image Access Protocol, SIAP6), spectra (Simple Spectra Access Protocol, SSAP7) and source catalogues (Simple Cone Search, SCS8).

Data Modelling

The role of the Data Modelling Working Group is to provide a framework for the description of metadata attached to observed or simulated data. The activity of the Data Model WG activity focuses on logical relationships between these metadata, examines how an astronomer wants to retrieve, process and interpret astronomical data, and provides an architecture to handle them. What is defined in this WG can then be re-used in the protocols defined by the DAL WG or in VO aware applications.

Grid and Web Services

The aim of the Grid and Web Services(GWS) Working Group is to define the use of Grid technologies and web services within the VO context and to investigate, specify, and implement required standards in this area. This group was formed from a merger of the Web Services group and the Grid group, ordered at the IVOA Executive meeting held during the IAU General Assembly in 2003.

Resource Registry

The Resource Registry Working Group defines the structure and interface to an IVOA Registry. Such a registry “ … will allow an astronomer to be able to locate, get details of, and make use of, any resource located anywhere in the IVO space, i.e. in any Virtual Observatory. The IVOA will define the protocols and standards whereby different registry services are able to interoperate and thereby realise this goal.”

Semantics

The Semantics Working Group will explore technology in the area of semantics with the aim of producing new standards that aid the interoperability of VO systems. The Semantics Working Group is concerned with the meaning or the interpretation of words, sentences, or other language forms in the context of astronomy. This includes standard descriptions of astrophysical objects, data types, concepts, events, or of any other phenomena in astronomy. The WG covers the study of relationships between words, symbols and concepts, as well as the meaning of such representations (ontology). The WG covers use of natural language in astronomy, including queries, translations, and internationalization of interfaces.

VO Query Language

The VO Query Language (VOQL) Working Group will be in charge of defining a universal Query Language to be used by applications accessing distributed data within the Virtual Observatory framework.

VOTable

The VOTable Working Group is in charge of the VOTable format, which is an XML standard for the interchange of data represented as a set of tables. [2] In this context, a table is an unordered set of rows, each of a uniform format, as specified in the table metadata. Each row in a table is a sequence of table cells, and each of these contains either a primitive data type, or an array of such primitives. VOTable is derived from the Astrores format, itself modelled on the FITS Table format; VOTable was designed to be closer to the FITS Binary Table format.

Theory Interest Group

During the IVOA executive meeting of January 2004 in Garching, Germany, the IVOA Theory Interest Group (TIG) was formed with the goal of ensuring that theoretical data and services are taken into account in the IVOA standards process. By its charter, the IVOA Theory Interest Group intends to:

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dublin Core</span> Standardized set of metadata elements

The Dublin Core, also known as the Dublin Core Metadata Element Set (DCMES), is a set of fifteen main metadata items for describing digital or physical resources. It was the first metadata standard for describing web content. The Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI) is responsible for formulating the Dublin Core; DCMI is a project of the Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T), a non-profit organization.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Interoperability</span> Ability of systems to work with each other

Interoperability is a characteristic of a product or system to work with other products or systems. While the term was initially defined for information technology or systems engineering services to allow for information exchange, a broader definition takes into account social, political, and organizational factors that impact system-to-system performance.

Message-oriented middleware (MOM) is software or hardware infrastructure supporting sending and receiving messages between distributed systems. MOM allows application modules to be distributed over heterogeneous platforms and reduces the complexity of developing applications that span multiple operating systems and network protocols. The middleware creates a distributed communications layer that insulates the application developer from the details of the various operating systems and network interfaces. APIs that extend across diverse platforms and networks are typically provided by MOM.

In computer and telecommunications networks, presence information is a status indicator that conveys ability and willingness of a potential communication partner—for example a user—to communicate. A user's client provides presence information via a network connection to a presence service, which is stored in what constitutes his personal availability record and can be made available for distribution to other users to convey their availability for communication. Presence information has wide application in many communication services and is one of the innovations driving the popularity of instant messaging or recent implementations of voice over IP clients.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hierarchical Data Format</span> Set of file formats

Hierarchical Data Format (HDF) is a set of file formats designed to store and organize large amounts of data. Originally developed at the U.S. National Center for Supercomputing Applications, it is supported by The HDF Group, a non-profit corporation whose mission is to ensure continued development of HDF5 technologies and the continued accessibility of data stored in HDF.

Web Services Discovery provides access to software systems over the Internet using standard protocols. In the most basic scenario there is a Web Service Provider that publishes a service and a Web Service Consumer that uses this service. Web Service Discovery is the process of finding suitable web services for a given task.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Learning object metadata</span> Data model

Learning Object Metadata is a data model, usually encoded in XML, used to describe a learning object and similar digital resources used to support learning. The purpose of learning object metadata is to support the reusability of learning objects, to aid discoverability, and to facilitate their interoperability, usually in the context of online learning management systems (LMS).

The ISO/IEC 11179 metadata registry (MDR) standard is an international ISO/IEC standard for representing metadata for an organization in a metadata registry. It documents the standardization and registration of metadata to make data understandable and shareable.

The AgMES initiative was developed by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations and aims to encompass issues of semantic standards in the domain of agriculture with respect to description, resource discovery, interoperability, and data exchange for different types of information resources.

The US National Virtual Observatory'-NVO- was conceived to allow scientists to access data from multiple astronomical observatories, including ground and space-based facilities, through a single portal. Originally, the National Science Foundation (NSF) funded the information technology research that created the basic NVO infrastructure through a multi-organization collaborative effort. The NVO was more than a “digital library”; it was a vibrant, growing online research facility akin to a bricks-and-mortar observatory for professional astronomers.

A virtual observatory (VO) is a collection of interoperating data archives and software tools which utilize the internet to form a scientific research environment in which astronomical research programs can be conducted.

VOEvent is a standardized language used to report observations of astronomical events; it was officially adopted in 2006 by the International Virtual Observatory Alliance (IVOA). Though most VOEvent messages currently issued are related to supernovae, gravitational microlensing, and gamma-ray bursts, they are intended to be general enough to describe all types of observations of astronomical events, including gravitational wave events. Messages are written in XML, providing a structured metadata description of both the observations and the inferences derived from those observations. The rapid dissemination of event data with a formalized language was the original impetus for the creation of VOEvents and the network used to transport the messages; indeed VOEvent messages are designed to be compact and quickly transmittable over the internet. The VOEvent language continues to evolve; the latest version is 2.0.

The Open Geospatial Consortium Web Coverage Service Interface Standard (WCS) defines Web-based retrieval of coverages – that is, digital geospatial information representing space/time-varying phenomena.

IEC 60870 part 6 in electrical engineering and power system automation, is one of the IEC 60870 set of standards which define systems used for telecontrol in electrical engineering and power system automation applications. The IEC Technical Committee 57 have developed part 6 to provide a communication profile for sending basic telecontrol messages between two systems which is compatible with ISO standards and ITU-T recommendations.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Metadata</span> Data about data

Metadata is "data that provides information about other data", but not the content of the data itself, such as the text of a message or the image itself. There are many distinct types of metadata, including:

Web of Things (WoT) describes a set of standards by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) for the interoperability of different Internet of things (IoT) platforms and application domains.

The Handle System is the Corporation for National Research Initiatives's proprietary registry assigning persistent identifiers, or handles, to information resources, and for resolving "those handles into the information necessary to locate, access, and otherwise make use of the resources".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Open Cloud Computing Interface</span> Open protocol for cloud computing

The Open Cloud Computing Interface (OCCI) is a set of specifications delivered through the Open Grid Forum, for cloud computing service providers. OCCI has a set of implementations that act as proofs of concept. It builds upon World Wide Web fundamentals by using the Representational State Transfer (REST) approach for interacting with services.

The Space Physics Archive Search and Extract (SPASE) effort is an international consortium formed in 2001. Its mission is to define standards and services to enable the establishment and operation of discipline specific Virtual Observatories. The main focus of the consortium is to define and maintain a standard data model to enable data sharing and interoperability within the Space and Solar Physics community. Another goal of the consortium is to facilitate data search and retrieval across the Space and Solar Physics data environment by providing conventions, tools and services to assist data providers, researchers and general users. The SPASE consortium also encourages collaboration between agencies and groups interested in sharing space and solar physics data.

Cloud Infrastructure Management Interface (CIMI) is an open standard API specification for managing cloud infrastructure.

References

  1. Archived 2011-12-03 at the Wayback Machine ,"IVOA",05/2003
  2. Francois Ochsenbein & Roy Williams, IVOA VOTable Format Definition, "IVOA", 30/11/2009