WP-A5: Pilot Programme

The aim of the AstroGrid Pilot Programme is to identify issues arising in database federation that should be addressed in detail in AstroGrid's technical workpackages (WP-A2, WP-A3, WP-A4 & WP-A9). The choice of the set of five pilots is motivated by their addressing different aspects of the general database federation problem, as well as their involving the different parts of AstroGrid's user community. To help identify as full a set of issues as possible, each pilot should proceed to the point at which users can readily do real science with it.

A few test users will be identified (by a procedure TBD) to try out the protoype systems delivered by each pilot. These test users will be selected as being willing to put some effort into this procedure, in return for the scientific advantage of having access to the prototype federations and tools to exploit them. They must also be sufficiently knowledgable within their own areas to be able to provide informed feedback on what additional functionality their user communities will require from the final AstroGrid deliverables. The user interfaces to the prototype deliverables will necessarily be quite rudimentary, so it is likely that the test users will need some help from the team that produced the prototype tools to get started using them.

The feedback from the test users will be combined with the experiences of the team working on each pilot to produce a final report on the Pilot Programme at the end of Phase A, but information should be promptly fed to the manager of the relevant technical workpackage during the course of Phase A, whenever a pilot identifies an issue requiring more detailed consideration. Conversely, the pilot programme teams should keep abreast of developments in the technical workpackages, and, more importantly, in the setting of Science Requirements in WP-A1, so that they can incorporate, where possible, knowledge accrued elsewhere in the project. However, this must take a lower priority to the delivery of a fully-functioning system, so it is understood that the pilots probably will not deploy much of the technology being studied in Phase A by the technical workpackages, but, rather, be assembled primarily from existing software.

WP-A5 is divided into six sub-packages - the five pilots and an overall coordination activity - each with its own workpackage manager, and these are described in turn below.

• WP-A5.0: Pilot Programme Coordination

• WP-A5.1: Optical/Near-IR pilot - Large Object Catalogues

• WP-A5.2: X-ray pilot - Association techniques

• WP-A5.3: Radio pilot - Fourier data

• WP-A5.4: Solar pilot - Data selection from summary information

• WP-A5.5: STP pilot - Time-series data

In the case of all five pilots, the work to be undertaken overlaps with the existing interests of the relevant data centre(s), so that some further help will be available, in addition to the AstroGrid-funded effort listed in the sections for each subpackage.

[A copy of the document describing the whole of WP-A5 (dated 2002-02-26) is available here.]

-- BobMann - 25 Feb 2002