The Italian role in the international VO projects

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The Italian role in the international VO projects

• Fabio Pasian INAF/SI
• VObs.it Workshop
• Monte Porzio, 23-24 November 2006

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Summary

• VObs.it
• Italian areas of interest in
• IVOA
• VO-Tech
• VO-DCA
• What can be done at the national level?

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The Virtual Observatory

• The Virtual Observatory will be a system that
  allows astronomers to interrogate multiple data
  centers in a seamless and transparent way, which
  provides new powerful analysis and visualization
  tools within that system, and which gives data
  centers a standard framework for publishing and
  delivering services using their data.
• This is made possible by standardization of data
  and metadata, by standardization of data exchange
  methods, and by the use of a registry, which
  lists available services and what can be done
  with them
• (from International Virtual Observatory Alliance
  Guidelines for Participation, 2003-07-01)

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International Virtual Observatory Alliance

• Formed in June 2002.
• The mission of the IVOA is To facilitate the
  international coordination and collaboration
  necessary for the development and deployment of
  the tools, systems, and organizational structures
  necessary to enable the international utilization
  of astronomical archives as an integrated and
  interoperating Virtual Observatory.
• IVOA participating organizations
• are expected to have serious VO development
  efforts that represent wide collaboration and
  consensus at the national and/or international
  level ...
• have representation in the IVOA Executive
  Committee

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Euro-VO

• MOU between the partners (ESA, ESO, INAF, INSU,
  INTA, Max-Planck, NOVA, PPARC) to conduct a
  coordinated program of work entitled the EURO-VO
  that is directed towards the establishment of a
  persistent Virtual Observatory (VO) research
  infrastructure for European astronomy.
• The current resources and funds directed to the
  EURO-VO program by the partners are those
  identified within the VO-TECH project (and
  VO-DCA) and/or existing partner programs.
• (from the Euro-VO MOU, 2005-10-18)

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VObs.it Intro

• VObs.it, member of IVOA and Euro-VO, is the
  Italian contribution to the International Virtual
  Observatory collaboration.
• Wide experience in Grid participation in Grid.it
  (WP to bring dbs and instrumentation under Grid
  infrastructure). Italian communitys own
  astronomy Grid project DRACO (Italian Datagrid
  for Research in Astrophysics and Coordination
  with the virtual Observatory), a Grid project
  having the aim of proving the feasibility of
  implementing a distributed multi-functional
  environment allowing the use of specialized
  (observational, computing, storage) Grid nodes
  on a production Grid.
• From 2003 to 2005, the participation of Italy in
  VO activities has been delegated to DRACO.
• After the Euro-VO MoU was signed by INAF in
  October 2005, a separate VO project (VObs.it) was
  established and funded by INAF. The aim of the
  project is to coordinate within a unified
  approach the archives and databases developed by
  the Italian community. The first steps in this
  direction are to foster the adoption of IVOA
  standards,to participate in their definition, and
  to provide Grid-aware VO applications.

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VObs.it Management

• VObs.it is coordinated by the Information Systems
  Unit (SI) of INAF.
• Budget provided by INAF (yearly)
• Funds assigned in 2006 FY (110 K)
• corresponding to 3 FTE travel overhead
• alas, manpower budget used to advance VO-Tech
  funds assignment
• taking advantage of permanent INAF staff
• taking advantage of non-permanent staff assigned
  to Grid and Data Processing projects
• CINECA participates within the 2005-07 agreement
  
• Participation of ASDC was recommended by the
  ASI-INAF ASDC Steering Committee

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VObs.it objectives

• To integrate the currently-available archives
  (high-energy missions, TNG, GSC2 mirror, radio
  archives) within the VObs framework
• To allow the design archives under development
  (LBT, VST, SRT, 2nd-level archives) to be
  VObs-compliant
• To harmonise data retrieval and processing
  facilities for all archives, providing similar
  tools and functionalities
• To integrate archives of theoretical and
  simulated data, currently under development in
  the framework of a national Theory VObs project,
  so as to make them available within the VObs
  infrastructure
• To allow massive production of theoretical and
  simulated data, by providing access to parallel
  and distributed computing facilities, using the
  standard middleware currently in use for
  computational grids (e.g. EGEE)

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IVOA activities

• Participation in (in decreasing order of
  involvement)
• IVOA Exec
• Semantics WG (coordination)
• Grid and Web services WG (AAVOSpace Tiger Team)
• Theory IG (SNAP)
• Applications IG
• Data Model WG (theory)
• Registry WG
• ...
• Data Access Layer, VOTable, VOQL WGs

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VO-Tech and VO-DCA

• Both funded by EU/FP6
• VO-Tech (Specific Support Action)
• 3291 K in 3 ? 4 years (436 K to Italy)
• INAF-IASF Rome, INAF-O.A.Catania,
  INAF-O.A.Trieste, Università di Napoli Federico
  II
• 10 FTE in 4 years
• VO-DCA (Coordination Activity)
• 1540 K in 2 years (176 K to Italy)
• INAF-O.A.Trieste
• 4 FTE in 2 years

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VO-Tech DS3 New Infrastructure

• To design mature infrastructure components for
  EuroVO
• To assess key new infrastructural technologies
• To ensure interoperability and international
  integration
• ...and with a little detail thrown inThis task
  aims at producing final designs of mature
  components, as well as assessments, designs and
  trials of new components. It is expected that the
  priority areas will be in authentication/authorisa
  tion in work-flow and in distributed storage
  (VOSpace). In addition, DS3 has a responsibility
  for considering interoperability, integration and
  testing within the context of the overall EuroVO
  architecture and hence liaising with the VOFC.
  This will also include full internationalisation
  of the EuroVO programme, designing customisation
  tools for deployment across Europe and
  mix-and-match integration with other projects.
  DS3 will also have the prime responsibility for
  liaising with the NA4 work-package of the FP6
  programme Enabling Grids for E-Science in Europe
  (EGEE).

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VO-Tech DS4 New User Tools

• This task will produce designs and prototypes for
  new VO-compliant end-user tools. We will produce
  a list of suggested priority tools. This will
  partially be based on the experience and feedback
  of precursor projects and will be based on input
  from the scientific user community.
• Work will be conducted in close collaboration
  with data providers, e.g., members of the Data
  Centre Alliance, current and future missions,
  simulations as well as tool builders. A goal is
  to help existing facilities with technology
  take-up and to have a lasting impact on Astronomy
  data centres and their user community by
  exploring new designs and deriving generalized
  IVOA standards.
• Comparison of observations with numerical
  simulations

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VO-Tech DS5 Intelligent Resource Discovery

• The first goal of DS5 is to undertake a
  feasibility study for developing components based
  on emergent technologies in the areas of the
  Semantic Web and Ontologies. This study will be
  used as a reference for actual component designs
  and trial implementations, and ultimately
  developments of standards at the IVOA level. The
  feasibility study will consist in two parallel
  actions
• surveying available techniques, standards and
  tools related to the Semantic Web and Ontologies,
  identifying their scope, community-support and
  limitations.
• identifying a list of possible science cases
  where intelligent resource discovery tools could
  be developed for astronomers, highlighting
  interactions with related IVOA working groups
  when relevant.
• A short-list of component designs and trial
  implementations will stem from the combination of
  these two actions. Participants in DS5 will then
  focus on these selected science-cases. Building
  on the knowledge gained from these experiments,
  standards should be suggested for acceptance by
  the IVOA.
• Because the semantic web and ontologies are
  active research topics, a technology watch for
  the evolution of techniques, standards and tools
  will have to be performed throughout the VOTech
  project duration.

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VO-Tech DS6 Data Exploration

• Assessment of algorithms and packages. Software
  Survey to assess relevant, existing software in
  the fields of visualisation and data mining.
• Running tools as distributed services. Prototype
  the wrapping of existing command line tools to
  expose them as web services which can be run
  within the developing VObs infrastructure. We
  shall assess whether some data exploration tasks
  are sufficiently compute-intensive that they need
  to be run as compute-grid jobs, and will
  determine the impact that has on the VObs.
• VObs-compliance. Existing tools will be made VObs
  compliant by making them conform to agreed (e.g.
  IVOA) standards for registry metadata, workflow
  and use of distributed storage. Conversely,
  exercise existing standards (e.g. VOTable as a
  transport mechanism for tabular datasets) and may
  drive the development of new standards within the
  IVOA framework.
• Extension to extremely large datasets. Study the
  scalability issues essential to the effective
  exploration of data sets of large volume and/or
  high dimensionality. This may include the use of
  specialized data structures, the deployment of
  data exploration services directly on databases
  at the data centre and the generation of
  visualizations on the server side.

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VO-DCA WP2 European DCA strategy

• The aim is to define the detailed project
  programme, and to produce a medium term strategic
  plan for the Euro-VO Data Centre Alliance.
• Goal strategy for Euro-VO infrastructure
• Goal strategy for FP7 funding requests
• Goal long term plan for the Euro-VO Data Centres
  after the end of VO-DCA

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VO-DCA WP3 Support to take-up and implementation
of the VObs framework

• This task will organize the activities necessary
  to disseminate knowledge about interoperability
  standards and tools among European data centres,
  and to avoid duplication of efforts by
  instructing data centre managers and organizing
  the sharing of experience.
• Implementation in involved Data Centres
• WP 3-2 Technical feedback activities. It will
  organise feedback on implementation and new
  requirements, to be reported to VO-TECH and IVOA
  through PCT

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VO-DCA WP4 Theory in VObs

• The aim is to assess the inclusion of theory data
  and services in the VObs. TEG composed of
  recognized experts chosen among specialists who
  have started or intend to start to develop
  theoretical services for the VObs. Get technical
  input and refine requirements, with the Theory
  Interest Working Group of the IVOA, to which it
  is expected to provide leading-edge input, and
  with WP5 for aspects at the interface with the
  computational grid usage for massive computing.
  (SNAP)
• Implementation in involved Data Centres

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VO-DCA WP5 Coordination with computational grid
projects

• INAF is WP leader
• Achieve coordination between the VObs and the
  computational grid communities. Achieve the
  possibility for VObs users to exploit (through
  the Data Centres) the processing capabilities
  offered by computational Grids either nationally,
  or at the European level. Maximum priority will
  be given to coordination with EGEE .
• Definition of standards in common between VO
  Grid
• Implementation in involved Data Centres
• Knowledge acquisition Coordination Suggestions
  and guidelines Dissemination

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What can be done? How?

• What can be done at the national level?
• Within VO-DCA WP3 census of data centres give
  support for the uptake of IVOA standards get
  feedback
• Within VO-DCA WP4 give support to activities
  concerning theory data get feedback
• Within VO-DCA WP5 define standards for VO-Grid
• Within VO-Tech contribute tools
• Within VObs.it facilitate national activities
  and representation in international bodies
• Increase participation in IVOA WGs!
• How?
• Goal of this workshop (dont miss the discussion!)

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