See Nic Walton's minutes (ref?) for official minutes of the meeting. I shall go through this and 'reduce' it appropriately soonish, really. - MCH

Work Area Reports

WA0 - Programme

See 'Annex 1 - Description of work' for the project milestones (someone did ask during the meeting that project documents be dated and authored at least, preferably versioned). Has this got a url we can link to?

The first annual report is due in November. Peter wants project reports againsta all the deliverables, by 1st November. 'Several pages' including progress, finance, personnel.

AVO is now fully separated from Opticon. [There is an Opticon Meeting 24/25 Sep, Paris, nobody needs to go for AVO reasons]

Brumfeld from Nature magazine is doing an article on Virtual Observatories.

There will be a meeting in Jan to set standards. Is this too late? Will standards be set by default...? - MCH

WA1 - Science

Core working data is a 'self documented' frequency/position data cube. (hypercube, but only 3d...). With this can do all kinds of useful sciency things.

Need calibration/common co-ords/scaling/transforms

Need visualisation/SED

Recommendations for the demo:

Create two data cubes, multiwavelength + homogeneous (GOODS & LMC since they provide a handy multiwavelength datasets)

From Aladdin, select an area of an image that will be cropped to create a 'Cut Out'. All other images and catalogues that are loaded in the Aladdin slicer will similarly be cropped to create a number of 'cut outs' of different wavelengths, ie the above frequency/position data cube.

The user can then click on pixels in the image, or objects, to plot SEDs/colour-colour/etc diagrams for that point/object.

Issues outstanding:

Transformations ('distortions') not yet made common between wavelengths. So how will this information be passed? How do World Coordinates fit with this?

No common interface to datasets - do not have the staff member employed yet to do this.

Want to be able to plug in datasets later, but expect only a subset for the demo.

Should we get involved in the discussions on the interfaces to the datasets? - MCH

WA2 - Interoperability

'VOTable percolation' - now widely used and widening.

Experiments/Pilots

AstroGrid DB task force has now become OGSA-DAI

GLU being tested for web services

Trying to set standards for

• UCDs,
• space/time co-ordinates,
• std cone search
• Resource/service metadata

Pushing the publishing of archives. Quite a lot. What formats are they using?

How should we interact with this? - MCH

Looking at what new functions are needed eg

• contour extraction,
• lookup/search for other observations of the same area

Conversion tools

Meeting on Standards, Strasboug 30 Sep - 1 Oct We should go! - MCH

WA3 - Technology

AstroGrid- phase A report due Nov 02; Phase B funding decision Oct 15th.

Keeping in touch with WFCAM progress

Datamining/Vizualisation workshop, Edin,Oct 24-25 – Bob Mann, reg at www.anc.ed.ac.uk/sdmiv/

The Demo

Demo WP1 – understanding and pre-cooking the data

Risks – catalogue data not available from ISAAC

Risks - Calibrating & Positioning images in time. WA2 meeting in Strasbourg

For us - need to define interface to Aladdin, including parameters for the user to specifiy for ACE - balance 'getting it done for Jan' with being able to use new similar applications, eg AIPS (Radio)

Stick to providing functions: Give the system to Scientists to do Science, avoiding problems with conflicts of interest ('scooping', eg NVO)

Proposed Symposium at Sydney: VLT/VO science combined. Main programme will be worked out after the Jan Demo (when we have a better idea of the practical issues). 2-3 days

Americans getting more interested in publishing legacy data (as part of making the most of 'astronomy investment') even to diverting funds from new instruments/telescopes. 'Old guard' pushing hard. Very much into VOTable. Keen on establishing standards. New projects including work packages for publishing data.

FP (Finance Proposal?) 6

Seeking to fund not just R&D but publishing data. Great Beurotalk ('production level resource', 'e-Inclusion' :-). Explicit links to other VOs.

One amongst 18,000 'expressions of interest'.

Proposal expected to get in end of 2003 for funding the year after, to fit with end of AVO Phase B.