AstroGrid/ University of Durham Workshop 15-16 June 2006

AstroGrid and the Department of Physics of the University of Durham are holding a two day workshop to introduce the Durham astronomy research community to the potential of emerging Virtual Observatory capabilities in supporting scientific research.

Agenda

The workshop agenda is as follows. On Thursday, the morning practical introductory talks will include time for you to try out the application being demonstrated.

Workshop Location

The workshop will be held in the Institute for Computational Cosmology http://www.icc.dur.ac.uk/index.php?content=Contacts/Zoom in the rooms OC218 (15th June) and OC304 (16th June).

Science Projects

We will divide into 3 groups of 4-5 people each to work on projects based on science goals. These should be specific problems which can be tackled using AstroGrid. The idea is that each group will decide on a science problem that they would like to work and they will be assisted by AstroGrid scientists and developers during the first day afternoon and second day morning. The afternoon sessions of the last day will then give each workgroup a chance to demonstrate what they have achieved!

AgDurhamJune06GroupA

AgDurhamJune06GroupB

AgDurhamJune06GroupC

Help

The AstroGrid workbench has Help links built-in. These are not complete, unfortunately, but some pre-publication pages are available:

• ApplicationLauncherHelp
• QueryBuilderHelp
• LookoutHelp
• ColourCutterHelp
• RegistryHelp

Also see http://software.astrogrid.org/usermanual/index.html (NB this is still under construction and some inter-help-page links are broken, apologies).

Pre-Workshop checklist

If possible, those with access to laptop computers should aim to bring those, and ensure that you have the following installed:

• Install Java JDK 1.4 DOWNLOAD or 1.5 DOWNLOAD
• Install Python (2.4 preferred) Note 1: on Linux systems it might be possible to install a binary kit using your distros package management system (rpm, yum, apt-get, urpmi etc) Note 2: OS X probably has the above installed by default.

In principle, AstroGrid software will work with Linux, XP or Mac OSX

We'll be setting up a wiki username account for all attendees before the meeting, please use http://wiki.astrogrid.org/bin/view/TWiki/TWikiRegistration to set your password.

We'll also be giving all attendees an astrogrid user account - again details via email. We encourage all to have a quick try at entering the system - try launching the workbench from http://software.astrogrid.org/userdocs/workbench.html

Astrogrid Help Pages

Help pages for using AstroGrid are at http://software.astrogrid.org/userdocs/index.html

Tutorial Worksheets

It would be useful if attendants would be able to work through some of these tutorial before the workshop http://software.astrogrid.org/usermanual/tutorials/index.html

Glossary:

A few buzzwords you might hear during the workshop ...

• VOQL: Virtual Observatory Query Language
• VOTable: a tabular data exchange standard
• DAL: Data Access Layer
• SIA: Simple Image Access
• SSA: Simple Spectral Access
• UCD: Uniform Content Descriptor

Find lots more at http://www.ivoa.net !

Attendance