Annual Report F or the Pe riod: 1 M a y 2012 through 30 Ap ril 2013

The Virtual Astronomical Observatory (VAO) is managed by the VAO, LLC, a non-profit company chartered in the District of Columbia and established as a partnership of the Associated Universities, Inc. and the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc. The VAO is sponsored by the National Science Foundation and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

Submitted to the National Science Foundation Pursuant to Cooperative Agreement AST-0834235

Contents Executive  Summary  ______________________________________   1   1   Management  ________________________________________   3   1.1   1.2   1.3   1.4   1.5   1.6   1.7  

Reporting and Communications _______________________________________ 3   Meetings _________________________________________________________ 4   International Collaboration ___________________________________________ 5   Project Schedule and Milestones ______________________________________ 6   Community Engagement ____________________________________________ 8   Personnel _______________________________________________________ 10   Financial Status __________________________________________________ 11  

2   Operations  _________________________________________   12   2.1   2.2   2.3   2.4  

Highlights _______________________________________________________ Science Operations _______________________________________________ Service Monitoring and Validation ____________________________________ Internal Operations ________________________________________________

12   13   14   16  

3   User  Support/Professional  Engagement   _________________   18   3.1   Outreach, Training, and Advocacy ____________________________________ 18   3.2   Web Site and Communication _______________________________________ 20   3.3   VAO Forum ______________________________________________________ 22  

4   Science  Applications   _________________________________   23   4.1   Data Discovery Tool _______________________________________________ 23   4.2   Interoperable SED Access and Analysis (Iris) ___________________________ 25   4.3   Catalog Cross-Comparison Service ___________________________________ 27  

5   Standards  and  Infrastructure   __________________________   29   5.1   IVOA Standards Development _______________________________________ 29   5.1.1   VAO Participation ________________________________________ 29   5.1.2   Completed Documents ____________________________________ 30   5.2   Data Sharing and Publishing ________________________________________ 31   5.2.1   VO on the Desktop _______________________________________ 33  

Appendix  A.   Presentations  and  Publications  ________________   36   Appendix  B.   Participants  ________________________________   39   Appendix  C.   Acronyms  and  Abbreviations  __________________   41  

Executive Summary This past year saw the successful deployment of updated and enhanced versions of all VAO science applications. The Data Discovery Tool (DDT) incorporated a new display interface with sky coverage “footprint” overlays, embedded image previews, an improved user interface, and SAMP (Simple Applications Messaging Protocol) support. The DDT is widely used and is often the first step in discovery of multi-wavelength data for further analysis. The Spectral Energy Distribution builder and analysis tool Iris was enhanced with an integrated desktop user interface, more versatile graphics, plug-in capabilities that allow users to add their own fitting functions, and SAMP support. A final release scheduled for May 2013 will include co-plotting, red- and blue-shifting, interpolation, and calculation of integrated quantities. In 2012 and 2013 there have been more than 500 downloads of the Iris package. The Scalable Cross-Comparison (SCC) service saw improvements in the user interface, incorporation of SAMP support, and the addition of several key catalogs (WISE, PPMX, DENIS3, UCAC3, TYCHO2); SDSS DR9 is being added now. VAO/VO services reached new levels of stability and compliance, with growth from 8,400 services to 9,300 services over the past year. Overall uptime exceeds 99%, and overall compliance of VAO member organization services with VO standards now exceeds 80%. (Most “violations” are minor and of little consequence for properly formatted queries.) A thorough review of the registry identified ~400 services in the broader VO community that were not being supported, and these were deprecated in the registry. Service growth greatly surpassed service deprecation. The VAO works extensively in standards and protocol development in concert with the International Virtual Observatory Alliance (IVOA), and VAO team members have leadership roles in the IVOA Technical Working Group, Registry WG, Data Access Layer WG, and Data Models WG. VAO supported completion of standards development work in the areas of the Registry, Grid and Web Services (VOSpace 2.0), and Data Models (Photometry Data Model 1.0). Other VAO supported standards activities include Spectral Data Model 2.0, UTypes 1.0, Simple Image Access Protocol 2.0, and a sky coverage footprint standard. Work also progressed on a suite of capabilities for data sharing and publication, including a toolkit for deployed a Table Access Protocol (TAP) server, an improved user interface to registering services in the VO Registry, and a “Dropbox-

VAO Annual Report 15 May 2010 – 30 April 2011

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Executive Summary

like” environment for data sharing in research collaborations. Progress on support for data cubes increased rapidly toward the end of the past year, this being a major thrust area for the remainder of the VAO program. Revision to the VAO Registry itself were undertaken to bring the VAO implementation up to date with the most recently agreed registry standards and to support a TAP-based query interface. Design specification and prototype implementations for Python interfaces to VO protocols and services were developed, both in a “pure Python” mode (for easiest integration into a user’s scripting environment) and in a higher-level interface, VOClient. We are coordinating work with the AstroPy collaboration in order to reach the increasing number of astronomers whose data analysis environment / language of choice is Python. Professional engagement activities in the past year included two Community Days: University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (November 14, 2012) and Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore (November 29, 2012). Each event featured VO demonstrations and tutorials and attracted about 50 participants. VAO had an exhibit at the January 2013 American Astronomical Society meeting in Long Beach, CA, and team members and collaborators also presented 12 poster papers. VAO team members also provided lectures and tutorials at the Penn State Statistics Summer School (June 2012), the NASA Exoplanet Sagan Summer Workshop, Pasadena (July 2012), and at the Brazilian National Astronomy Meeting and Brazlian VO Summer School (Sao Paulo, November 2012). Materials from these community outreach events are available through the VAO website.

VAO Annual Report 1 May 2012 – 30 April 2013

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Management

1 Management 1.1 Reporting and Communications Quarterly reports were submitted to NSF and NASA in July 2012 (April-June 2012), October 2012 (July-September 2012) and January 2013 (OctoberDecember 2012). This Annual Report covers the period from May 2012 through April 2013. The VAO continues with its established an internal reporting and review schedule, and schedules regular management and technical telecons and e-meetings (using the WebEx facility). B. Berriman (IPAC) established a bi-weekly reporting schedule for the task area leads and developed the reporting template. The reports are intended to inform the Director and Program Manager on achievements in the past two weeks, performance measured against milestones and on problems that have recently appeared. Berriman leads a weekly team telecon attended by the Director, the task leads and their deputies, which is open to any interested members of the team in general. The telecons are intended to ensure the task areas remain focused on executing the PEP. Each work area holds weekly telecon or WebEx meetings. The Program Manager holds a weekly telecon with each task area lead. The telecons are intended to inform project management of progress towards milestones and ensure the team stays focused on delivering milestones. The telecons give task leads the opportunity to have frank discussion of emerging issues with the Program Manager, and to develop strategies to correct them early. Hanisch leads a weekly management telecon attended by Berriman, J. Lazio (JPL), A. Szalay (JHU), M. Claro (AUI), and the work area leads: R. Plante (NCSA), J. Evans (SAO), S. Bunn (Caltech), and T. McGlynn (HEASARC). G. Fabbiano (SAO), Chair of the Science Council, joins this telecon on a monthly basis to review progress and discuss issues related to science initiatives. Requirements and design reviews for science initiatives have been carried out by WebEx. These reviews are led by the development leads and are attended by representatives of management, User Support and Operations, as well as by the development team itself.

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The Configuration Change Board (CCB) meets biweekly by telecom or WebEx as needed to review requests for changes to released software and documentation. The CCB is chaired by the Program Manager, and board consists of the task leads of the work areas. All members of the VAO team are welcome to attend the CCB meetings. A technical response to the PEP review, held in late June 2012, was delivered to NSF and NASA on schedule on July 6, 2012. On February 15, 2013, the VAO delivered a Project Execution Plan to cover the period starting February 15, 2013 to project close on September 30, 2014. The plan emphasized close-out activities. The VAO is preparing an updated PEP in response to an internal review of the PEP by the NSF and NASA. This is due May 1, 2013.

1.2 Meetings The project held two team meetings. The first meeting was hosted by the AUI, on April 26-27, 2012 in Washington, D.C. The second meeting was hosted by Microsoft Inc. in Seattle, WA, on September 13- 14, 2012. The Seattle meeting immediately followed the Astroinformatics 2012 meeting, attended by several members of the VAO. VAO Program Manager B. Berriman convened the Program Council in Atlanta, GA in January, 2013. The Council negotiated work packages for the member organizations covering the period of February 2013 to September 2014. Several team members presented papers and demonstrations of VAO applications at the annual Astronomical Data Analysis Software and Systems (ADASS) conference in Champaign, Illinois, November 4-8, 2012. The VAO Board of Directors met at the AUI corporate office in Washington, DC on November 27-28, 2012, and held a teleconference on April 25, 2013. The VAO Director, R. Hanisch, was member of the review panel for the Common Astronomy Software Applications (CASA) review in Charlottesville, VA in March 2013.

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VAO Program Manager B. Berriman was a member of the Program Committee for the Workshop on Maintainable Software Practices in e-Science, October 8-9, 2012, part of the e-Science conference 2012, Chicago, IL. VAO Director R. Hanisch presented status reports to the AUI Board (February 15, 2013) and AURA Board (February 22, 2013). VAO Project Scientist J. Lazio gave a presentation at the annual AURA Member Representatives meeting in Tucson, May 17-19, 2013. In addition, team members gave interactive presentations on VAO services to attendees.

1.3 International Collaboration Members of the VAO collaboration attended the International Virtual Observatory Alliance (IVOA) Interoperability Meetings (“Interop”) in Urbana, Illinois, held May 21-25, 2012, and hosted by VAO partner NCSA, and in Sao Paul, Brazil on October 22-26, 2012. The Interoperability meetings are the focal point for discussion of the international VO standards and increasingly a venue for collaboration and consultation on VO-enabled research tools. Several VAO team members have leadership roles on IVOA Working Groups and Interest Groups. Hanisch and Fabbiano participate in the meetings of the IVOA Executive. A teleconference meeting of the IVOA Executive was held on November 13, 2012 with 17 participants. The next IVOA Interoperability workshop will be held in May 2013, hosted by the German Astrophysical Virtual Observatory (GAVO) in Heidelberg. VAO is coordinating the fall Interop workshop, to be held in conjunction with the ADASS conference in Kona, Hawaii, in late September. Just prior to the Sao Paulo meeting, VAO team members assisted with a VO School hosted by the Brazilian VO project, BRAVO, on November 18-19, 2012. R. Hanisch (STScI), M. Graham (Caltech), and M. Fitzpatrick were also invited speakers at the National Astronomy Meeting of Brazil, held in Aguas de Lindoia, November 16-17, 2012. Virtual Observatory-related events featured strongly at the International Astronomical Union General Assembly in Beijing, China in August 2012. Special Session 15: Data-Intensive Astronomy spanned four days and featured a number of presentations in which VO facilities play or will play a prominent role. Attendees included many people who were not already involved with VO programs. R. Hanisch served as a member of the Science Organizing Committee and gave the closing summary presentation. VAO Annual Report 1 May 2012 – 30 April 2013

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Management

IAU Commission 5 also held business meetings for the main Commission and its working groups, including Virtual Observatories, Data Centers, and Networks (also chaired by R. Hanisch). Commission 5 agreed to wind down the Working Group on Astronomical Data, instead folding its activities into the Commission itself, and added a new Working Group on Astroinformatics and Astrostatistics that will be chaired by E. Feigelson (Penn State) and co-chaired by P. Shastri (Indian Institute of Astrophysics, Bangalore). The Libraries Working Group also held a two-day meeting that included discussion of a new astronomy thesaurus to be constructed in collaboration with the IVOA.

1.4 Project Schedule and Milestones Version 1.0 of Years 3 and 4 of the Project Execution Plan (PEP) was delivered to the NSF on February 15, 2013. The work plan, described in the PEP, was negotiated at a meeting of the Program Council in January 2013. The plan responded to the agencies’ request to provide a close-out plan for the VAO, with the project closing on September 30, 2014, and subject to a budget of $3M in FY 2013 and $1.5M in FY 2014. The VAO is preparing a technical response to an internal review of the PEP, which is due May 1, 2013. The table below summarizes the milestones planned and accomplished in the past year.

Milestone

Delivered

Scheduled

Management Program Execution Plan 1st Quarterly Report Response to PEP 2nd Quarterly Report 3rd Quarterly Report Program Council Meeting Program Execution Plan Annual Report (this document) Response to PEP Review

VAO Annual Report 1 May 2012 – 30 April 2013

May 2012 July 2012 July 2012 October 2012 January 2013 January 2013 February 2013 April 2013

May 2012 July 2012 July 2012 October 2012 January 2013 January 2013 February 2013 April 2013

May 2013

May 2013

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Management

Milestone

Delivered

Scheduled

Standards and Infrastructure Spring IVOA Meeting Winter IVOA Meeting Python API

May 2012 October 2012 February 2013

May 2012 October 2012 December 2013

Science Applications Data Discovery Portal v1.3 Data Discovery Portal v1.4 Data Discovery Portal v1.5 Iris (SED Builder) v1.1 Iris (SED Builder) v.1.2 Iris (SED Builder) v 2.0 Scalable Cross-Comparison (SCC) v1.1 Scalable Cross-Comparison (SCC) v1.2

June 2012 October 2012 … August 2012 December 2012 … December 2012 …

June 2012 September 2012 May 2013 July2012 December 2012 May 2013 November 2013 April 2013

Operations Monthly Operations Report VAO Assets Inventory

Monthly April 2013

Monthly April 2013

Professional Engagement Summer School for Statistics Sagan Workshop LSST All-Hands Meeting VO Community Day, Michigan VO Community Day, Baltimore

June 2012 July 2012 August 2012 November 2012 November 2012

June 2012 July 2012 August 2012 November 2012 November 2012

Exhibit at 221th AAS Meeting. Austin, TX “Tools for Data Intensive Astronomy” Workshop, 219th AAS Meeting. Austin, TX Community Day – Tucson, AZ VAO Documentation Inventory

January 2012

January 2012

January 2012

January 2012

March 2012 April 2013

March 2012 April 2013

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1.5 Community Engagement The VAO organized Community Days at the University of Michigan on November 14, 2012 and at the Space Telescope Science Institute on November 29, 2012. We also prepared an exhibit at the 221st meeting of the American Astronomical Society, Long Beach, CA, held January 6-10, 2013. Twelve poster abstracts describing the VAO and its services were submitted to the AAS; these posters were displayed together at the Long Beach meeting. The VAO supported two community summer schools, the Summer School in Statistics for Astronomers VIII (June 4–8, 2012) at Pennsylvania State University and the 2012 Sagan Exoplanet Summer Workshop (July 23–27, 2012). For the Summer School in Statistics, there were a series of presentations and hands-on VO demonstrations delivered remotely by VAO staff. The presentations provided an overview of the Virtual Observatory, a summary of science applications being developed in the VO context, and steps toward probabilistic analysis in the era of big data. Significant participation in the hands-on workshop portion led to many students gaining direct exposure to VO science applications. VAO staff provided support for implementing cloud computing in advance of the Sagan Exoplanet Workshop. The Workshop desired to have each participant capable of analyzing sample data sets (extrasolar planet light curves), but also anticipated a significant number of participants (~150). In order to accommodate all participants, with VAO staff support, the Workshop was able to acquire time on Amazon computers. Two members of the VAO, R. Hanisch and B. Berriman, are members of the Advisory Board of the Astronomy Source Code Library (ASCL), which provides a comprehensive index of astronomical source codes used to produce the results of published papers. At the 221st AAS meeting, Hanisch, Berriman and VAO team member O. Laurino were members of a panel in a splinter session organized by the ASCL that discussed “Astrophysics Code Sharing.” At the Astronomical Data Analysis and Software XXII Conference, R. Hanisch and B. Berriman were co-organizers of a “Birds of a Feather Session” entitled “Bring out your codes! Bring out your codes! (Increasing Software Visibility and Re-use),” organized by the ASCL. Hanisch also served on the discussion panel. R. Hanisch and B. Berriman participate in monthly telecons of the Astronomy Data Centers Executive Council (ADEC), which coordinates the activities of NASA-

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funded data centers and archives. The VAO is working with the ADEC to develop a plan to achieve VO-compliance of the member organizations’ services. In the first instance, a plan is under development to make all the image access services compliant with the SIAP. B. Berriman presented ADEC members’ feedback on the ObsTAP capabilities at the IVOA meeting in Brazil, October 2012. B. Berriman represented the VAO at the e-Science 2012 meeting in Chicago, IL, October 8-12 2012. He gave demonstrations of VAO applications, took part in discussions on engaging end users in distributed software, and was member of two panels: one discussed engaging end users in adopting distributed software, the other discussed best practices in software development. As part of the collaboration with LSST, the VAO has continued to provide valueadded support to the LSST E/PO group (led by S. Jacoby) to prototype the infrastructure needed to support development of E/PO products; this work is needed to support the forthcoming Critical Design Review. J. Good has created a test database containing 90 million objects, and shown how existing code can be used to develop an infrastructure that supports the E/PO requirements to create products and support interaction with them through browser-based tools. One of the major capabilities for the E/PO program is to allow educators, students, and the general public to “adopt” part of the sky and visualize movies that show how the sky changes with time. This functionality involves accessing imaging data sets and producing multi-color images from them, and superposing the intensities of time-varying sources on these images. A proof-of-concept prototype developed by J. Good (IPAC) and T. Axelrod (LSST) involved using the Montage image mosaic engine to project multi-color images from the CFHT Legacy Survey onto the same image scale, generate three color images from them, and superpose on these images the intensities of variable sources from the Catalina Real Time Survey (CRTS). We are continuing discussions with LSST on the future course of this collaboration. VAO staff attended the LSST All-Hands Meeting held in Tucson, Arizona, August 1317, 2012. They participated in discussions of issues such as standards needed to support time-series data sets, management of transient data sets at scale, and gave a demonstration of the Time Series Protocol (TAP) compliant catalog access service, Seleste. The VAO had a strong presence at the SPIE Telescopes & Instrumentation Conferences held in Amsterdam, Netherlands, July 1-6, 2012. Five oral presentations were given by VAO staff (see Appendix A for details).

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Management

VAO Program Manager B. Berriman gave a keynote presentation entitled “Astronomy in the Cloud” at the .Astronomy 4 conference in Heidelberg, Germany, held July 9-11. VAO services were demonstrated as part of the conference’s extensive hands-on sessions. Berriman also gave an invited presentation entitled “Adoption of Software by a User Community: The Montage Image Mosaic Engine Example” at the First Workshop on Maintainable Software Practices in e-Science, held as part the IEEE eScience 2012 meeting in Chicago, October 8-12, 2012. The Montage engine was built specifically for the VO.

1.6 Personnel On October 1, 2012, S. Emery Bunn (Caltech) assumed the role of lead for the User Support work area. The VAO appreciates the efforts of B. Stobie (NOAO) in this position since the beginning of the VAO project. On October 5, 2012, Marie Huffman left the VAO for a new position. Working through the Washington, D.C. office of Robert Half Associates, we have secured the services of Maricel Claro to act as VAO Business Manager on an interim basis. VAO key personnel: Director

Robert Hanisch (STScI)

Program Manager

Bruce Berriman (IPAC)

Project Scientist

Joseph Lazio (JPL)

Technology Advisor

Alexander Szalay (JHU)

Business Manager

Maricel Claro (AUI)

Operations Lead

Thomas McGlynn (HEASARC)

User Support Lead

Sarah Emery Bunn (Caltech)

Science Applications Lead

Janet Evans (SAO)

Standards and Infrastructure Lead Ray Plante (NSCA)

VAO Annual Report 1 May 2012 – 30 April 2013

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Over the past year approximately 14.25 FTE was spent on VAO work (NSF and NASA combined); we estimate another 2-3 FTE in in-kind effort. 74% of the effort was from men and 26% of the effort was from women.

1.7 Financial Status For the period May 2012—March 2013 the VAO had expenses of $1.96M (NSF funding), with monthly spending ranging from $93k—$305k. The monthly variation stems primarily from occasional delays in invoicing from sub-awardees. As of March 2013, VAO has a balance of $727k (NSF funding); this includes the release of Participant Cost funds to the general budget, per NSF agreement. The VAO, LLC completed its annual external audit of financial statements and A133 compliance for FY2013, which was conducted by BDO USA, LLP and presented to the VAO Board Finance and Audit Subcommittee on February 28, 2013, and approved by the full Board on April 25, 2013. BDO issued an unqualified opinion with no findings or questioned costs.

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2 Operations 2.1 Highlights VAO Operations entered a relatively steady state during the past year. An early highlight was the release of our new WordPress web site, which allows much easier and more distributed updates to the site. Our JIRA server suffered a catastrophic failure in the first quarter of the year. While transition to the backup was smooth, and a replacement put in place without disruption, this depressed the uptime metrics for the first half of the year. Since November 2012, uptime for all services, and especially our science tools, has been high. All VAO services were monitored on an hourly basis. A system alerting users to current or pending issues with VAO services on the VAO home page was established. Validation was performed for all registered Cone Search, Simple Image Access, Simple Spectral Access, Registry and Table Access services to measure compliance with VO standards. New features allowing users to select the types of services of interest were added to the web pages displaying results. Services that consistently failed to be responsive in even the most basic way were “deprecated,” i.e., kept in our registry but only returned if specifically requested by a user. The number of active data services in the VO grew steadily from about 8,400 at the beginning of the year to about 9,300 at the end. Had we not deprecated about 400 services during the year, the number would have exceeded 9,700. Logs of all VAO science services were included in the VAO logging service, along with many of the VAO internal resources and logs of VO data services maintained by VAO institutions. New procedures were implemented in our weekly operations telecons to address all help desk, service interruption and general VAO tickets. This led to a substantial reduction in the backlogs for these tickets. Similar efforts in the other task areas were also effective.

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Work began on setting up a closeout repository for VAO services. This a major focus of efforts over the next year.

2.2 Science Operations The IRIS SED tool and portal, cross-correlation, and time series web services are now fully deployed and available to the public. The VAO directory continues to provide a place for users to discover VO tools. The VAO web site provides links to, and the status of, all science services and also provides links to support developers interested in building VO-compatible services. VAO science services were announced to the community at the January 2012 AAS meeting. The graph shows initial uptake of science services in the spring and summer of 2012 with steadier usage since then. There is some growth in the IRSA based services (which comprise the crossmatch and time series services) in the later quarters. Iris downloads are relatively stable but the IPAC/NED line shows the number of Iris-initiated SED requests from NED. This increased dramatically in June 2012. The number of portal hits increased in September 2012 and has held since then. Some of that increase reflects the way data are distributed, rather than additional queries.

1,000,000   100,000   10,000   1,000  

IRIS  site  

100  

IPAC/NED   Portal  web  hits  

10  

VAO Annual Report 1 May 2012 – 30 April 2013

13

4/6/13  

2/6/13   3/6/13  

1/6/13  

12/6/12  

11/6/12  

10/6/12  

9/6/12  

8/6/12  

7/6/12  

6/6/12  

5/6/12  

4/6/12  

2/6/12   3/6/12  

1/6/12  

1  

Registry   IRIS  Downloads   IRSA  Services  

Operations

Figure 2-1. Usage of VAO science services.

2.3 Service Monitoring and Validation Monitoring and validation of VAO and external VO services is one of the major roles for Operations. This typically includes simple availability/liveness tests and more detailed tests that actually invoke the service in some substantial way. A VAO web page provides a current summary of the status of all VAO services, and a query-able database keeps track of uptime statistics with hourly resolution. All external sites with VO services are also monitored. The VAO Operations monitor frequently notifies both VAO and non-VAO site managers of issues with their services. Code to enable automated notifications to non-VAO sites has been developed and may be deployed as the VAO ceases operations and we no longer have personal follow-up of issues. Figure 2-2, below, gives the uptime for VAO services.

UpKme  for  VAO  services   100.0   90.0   80.0   70.0   60.0   50.0   40.0   30.0   20.0   10.0   0.0  

All  VAO  Services   VAO  science   services  

Figure 2-2. Uptime for VAO services. Many internal VAO services are monitored by various means, including logging, wiki, configuration management (CM), and validation. These have no effect on science usage of the VAO, so the uptime for key science services is broken out separately in the graph. The extended down-

VAO Annual Report 1 May 2012 – 30 April 2013

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time from June through October 2012 reflects the failure of the primary JIRA server. A backup server worked flawlessly during this period.

All registered VO services compliant with standard VO data-access protocols are now validated for compliance with the published standard, with every service tested on a roughly monthly time scale. Currently, tests are made for cone search, image, spectra and table services, though these are not currently included in our statistics on which services pass. All issues raised by the validators are saved in a database that can be viewed to see areas where standards compliance has proven difficult. Users can use a VAO web page to look for the issues encountered by a single service or for all services of a given type or institution. 100.00%   90.00%   80.00%   70.00%   60.00%   50.00%   40.00%   30.00%   20.00%   10.00%   0.00%  

VO  Overall   VAO  InsLtuLon  Services  

Figure 2-3. Validation statistics for VO and VAO services.

During this past year there was very significant improvement for the VO as a whole, with the number of passing services rising from just over 50% to almost 75%. This is largely attributable to improvements in the compliance of catalog services at the CDS’s Vizier, which accounts for most registered VO data services. Over the past two years the pass rate for the services associated with VAO institutions has increased steadily, from under 70% to about 81%. During the past year the validation database was used to look for obsolete or orphaned services in the VO registries. Such services were deprecated in the VAO

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registry so they will not mislead users or fail when queried by automated search tools. About 400 services were deprecated in the past year.

90.00%   80.00%   70.00%   60.00%   50.00%   40.00%   30.00%   20.00%   10.00%   0.00%  

ValidaKon  results  

VO  Overall  

Vizier  tries  UCD  1+   for  cone  search.  

VAO  InsLtuLon   Services  

Figure 2-4. Validation Results for VO and VAO services

2.4 Internal Operations The internal operations of the VAO are also a critical area for Operations. The web site, wiki, Trac site, test environment and SVN repository are all maintained and tested. The JIRA issue tracking system is a core element of VAO Operations. The failure and replacement of the primary JIRA server was a major activity in the first half of the year. Although the statistics include the failed server for several months, its function was fully subsumed by the backup. JIRA tickets are used to help organize and monitor the progress of all VAO activities. The following table gives the overall status of JIRA tickets as of April 12, 2013.

Project   VAO   Service  Interruption   Bug  Reports   Product  Development  

VAO Annual Report 1 May 2012 – 30 April 2013

Issues   101        (71)   414    (252)   121        (77)   827  (460)  

Open   0      (18)   4          (5)   23    (18)   258  (253)  

16

Closed   101        (53)   410    (247)   98        (59)   569  (207)  

Days/CIose   105  (38)   12  (13)   81  (33)   136  (76)  

Operations

HelpDesk   ALL  

93      (42)   1565  (910)  

4      (10)   290  (305)  

89      (32)   1275  (605)  

35  (19)   81  (39)  

Table 2-1. VAO ticket summary

The numbers in parentheses in Table 2-1 give the status in the previous annual report. Over the past year there has been a concerted effort to ensure tickets are closed. The absolute number of open tickets has dropped. The average time to close tickets has increased, since this only includes tickets that have been closed, and some very long-standing issues have finally been resolved. Similarly, the number of Product Development tickets almost doubled from 460 to 827, but the number of open Product Development tickets increased by only five. All open VAO, help desk and service interruption tickets are reviewed weekly at Operations telecons. Service interruptions are downtimes in VAO services or VO services more generally. Bug reports are externally generated and note problems, while product development issues include both problems found in internal testing and planned enhancements to services. Sometimes a bug report is resolved by opening an associated product development issue. Help desk issues relate specifically to external requests to the VAO. “Days/Close” is the number of days it took to resolve closed issues. The SVN repository is maintained to provide a repository for all VAO-developed code and data. The CM board meets to approve all major updates to VAO released tools. A document repository is also maintained to track the latest versions of all official documents of the VAO.

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3 User Support/Professional Engagement The VAO Professional Engagement Group provides the primary interface between the VAO and its user community. The VAO engages in outreach to the research community in order to expose VO products and services, assist in the adoption of those products and services, and gather feedback to ensure maximum utility of the VO for astronomical research.

3.1 Outreach, Training, and Advocacy Two VO Community Day events have been held this year: one in Ann Arbor, MI on the campus of the University of Michigan on November 14, 2012, and another at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, MD, on November 29, 2012. During these “VO Days,” which are aimed at research astronomers, VAO team members demonstrate tools and services for data-intensive astronomy in the context of a range of science use cases and tutorials. At the Michigan event, there were participants from the University of Michigan, Michigan State University, Wayne State University, and Ball State University. Activities included modeling the spectral energy distributions of blazars, desktop data analysis with the VO using IRAF, and a scavenger hunt-style session where science questions were posed to participants as a way of encouraging awareness of what VO resources are available to solve these problems. In Baltimore, participants came from STScI, NASA GSFC, the University of Maryland, Johns Hopkins University, George Mason University, Tarleton State University, and several remote viewers from the University of Rio de Janeiro. Talks included a presentation of VO-enabled science results from the CANDELS project, a tour of the VAO’s Data Discovery Tool, and a presentation on plans in the Astropy (Astronomy in Python) community for supporting VO standards. The VO Day events attracted approximately 50 attendees each, and feedback has been very positive. The Baltimore event was captured on video, and there is a link to a webcast of the talks at the page for the Baltimore Community day.1 The VAO had a strong presence at the 221st Meeting of the American Astronomi1

 http://www.usvao.org/support-­‐community/vodaybaltimore  

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cal Society in Long Beach, California, held January 6-10, 2013. The VAO had a double booth in the exhibit hall, and team members were on hand in the exhibit to demonstrate VO tools and capabilities, discuss individual research questions, and conduct outreach on how to contribute to the VO. In preparation for the AAS exhibit 12 tutorials on VO/VAO tools and services were prepared.

A selection of photos of the VAO exhibit and posters at AAS221 in Long Beach, CA

Several VAO-themed posters were presented in the “Computation, Data Handling, and Image Analysis” Contributed Poster Session of the conference. VAO staff and affiliated researchers presented 12 poster papers in this session, describing Virtual Observatory tools and illustrating their use, and highlighting recent research results that have made use of VO tools. A list of these posters can be found on the VAO web site.2 The VAO led a hands-on workshop on VO-enabled science applications at the Penn State Summer School in Statistics in June 2012. The Summer School in Statistics is designed for graduate students and researchers in astronomy. VAO 2

 http://www.usvao.org/2013/01/03/vaoaas221  

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team members made presentations on various aspects of VAO science applications, on how to design software in the era of "big data" astronomy, and facilitated a hands-on workshop using VO-enabled tools such as Iris and the Data Discovery Tool to address a set of science questions. The VAO made five presentations at the SPIE Telescopes and Instrumentation Conferences in Amsterdam, Netherlands, July 1-6, 2012. Topics for these included the role of the VAO in the era of massive data sets, management of distributed software development, and virtual observatory operations. The VAO supported the NASA Exoplanet Science Institute’s (NExScI) annual Sagan Summer Workshop in Pasadena, California July 23-27, 2012. This year the workshop focused on the analysis of exoplanet light curves. Hands-on sessions instructing the 160 participants in the use of open source analysis tools were enabled by VAO guidance on the use of cloud computing resources, and the VAO Project Scientist gave an overview presentation about the Virtual Observatory. The IAU General Assembly was held in Beijing, China, from August 20-31, 2012. Several VO-related events were scheduled there, including a special session on data-intensive astronomy, and a meeting of the Working Group on Virtual Observatories, Data Centers, and Networks. VAO team members attended and contributed to the Astronomical Data Analysis Software and Systems (ADASS) conference in Champaign, Illinois, November 48, 2012. The VAO presence at ADASS included oral presentations, focus demos, a poster, and a Birds of a Feather session.

3.2 Web Site and Communication During the past year, news items summarizing Virtual Observatory news for the astronomical research community were posted to the web site3 at a rate of approximately three posts per month. These news items are also pushed to subscribers via RSS, Facebook4, and Twitter5 streams.

3

 http://www.usvao.org    https://www.facebook.com/usvao   5  https://twitter.com/usvao   4

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User Support staff supported deployment of new versions of the VAO’s science tools and services, including releases of the Data Discovery Tool, the Iris SED Analysis Tool, and the Scalable Cross-Comparison Tool. Support of these releases include documentation updates, launch page updates, web site news items, and testing of services. The "Support & Community" page6 has been updated to include materials on the VO Community days that took place in the past year. Materials from Community days in Baltimore, Ann Arbor, Tucson, Austin, Los Angeles, and Boston are available, including a link to a webcast recording of the Baltimore VO Day. Two issues of “The Virtual Observer”—the VAO newsletter—have been published (July 2012, March 2013).7 This biannual newsletter for astronomers is a summary of Virtual Observatory news for the US astronomical research community. The newsletter is posted to our mailing list, Twitter, and Facebook subscribers. The VAO mailing list has 720 subscribers, up about 50 new users from this time last year. The VAO Twitter feed has 135 followers (up 65 from last year), and the VAO Facebook page is “liked” by 140 people (up 92 from last year). The VAO YouTube channel8, which hosts tutorial videos on science tools, has 26 subscribers and 3,037 video views. Two issues of the IVOA Newsletter (May 2012, October 2012) were published this year, sent via email to astronomers around the world and can be found online.9 The newsletter highlights VO tools and technologies for doing astronomy research, recent papers, and upcoming events. The issues include items on several VAO tools and services. The next issue is planned to be published in conjunction with the May 2013 IVOA Interoperability Meeting in Heidelberg, Germany. A new version of the IVOA web site10 was released in April 2013. This version provides an attractive new design and improvements to the navigational structure. Different types of visitors can follow different paths. Notably, the structure al-

6

 http://www.usvao.org/support-­‐community    http://www.usvao.org/  news/virtual-­‐observer   8  https://www.youtube.com/user/usvaoTV   9  http://ivoa.net/newsletter   10  http://www.ivoa.net   7

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lows scientists, developers or service deployers, and IVOA members to more easily find the information specific to their needs. User Support staff monitor and respond to VAO Help Desk inquiries and refer them to other team members for resolution/answers. Statistics on help desk tickets can be found in the Operations section of this report.

3.3 VAO Forum The VAO Forum11 is maintained and backed up by User Support staff. Over the course of the past year there have been 15 discussions consisting of 44 comments. These discussions were provided by 45 active users (of ~120 real accounts), resulting in a total of 7,359 page views. The issue of spam accounts is growing substantially; we estimate we deal with 46 new spam users per day; administrators manually delete these every few days. Spam users can create their own profile pages, but cannot post or answer questions. All new questions are tweeted and re-tweeted by the VAO Twitter feed12 to 43 followers, at last count. Especially active discussions are also tweeted out to followers. There was a poster on the VAO forum at the January 2013 AAS meeting in Long Beach.

11

 http://astrobabel.com    https://twitter.com/astrobabel  

12

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4 Science Applications The activities in the Science Applications task area during the past year focused on further development of useful scientific analysis tools and services (i.e., Data Discovery Tool, Iris, and the Catalog Cross-Comparison service) that also demonstrate the utilization of VO standards and infrastructure. A focus for the year across all of the science applications was interoperability via VO SAMP. Data from the Data Discovery Tool can be successfully broadcast to other tools including Iris and SCC. Iris and SCC were upgraded to receive that data as input to the applications. The applications were also upgraded to broadcast their output products via SAMP for downstream applications. We found one common use is to broadcast data to the popular table viewer application Topcat for visualizing in plots and graphs. Our experience implementing SAMP has shown it to be robust and very useful. Several product releases from each of the projects were successfully completed over the year. Public access to the applications is from the US VAO Science tools web site. Software development highlights for the Data Discovery tool, Iris, and the Catalog Cross-Comparison service are provided below.

4.1 Data Discovery Tool The Data Discovery Tool (DDT) is a web application for discovering all resources known to the VAO about an astrophysical object or a region of the sky. Using protocols defined by the International Virtual Observatory Alliance (IVOA), the DDT can search those widely distributed resources and present the results in a single, unified web page. Many of the most popular US archive and catalog holdings are available for searches in DDT, including HST, MAST, Chandra, HEASARC, SDSS, Spitzer, and 2MASS, to name a few. A powerful filtering mechanism allows the user to quickly narrow the initial results to a short list of likely applicable data. Guidance on choosing appropriate data sets is provided by a variety of integrated displays, including an interactive data table, basic histogram and scatter plots, and an allsky browser/visualizer with observation and catalog overlays (see Figure 4-1).

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Figure 4-1: The Data Discovery Tool in operation. Footprints are from images selected in the table view, to the left, and displayed on the Astroview visualizer on the right.

A major enhancement in 2012 was the addition of the Astroview image and footprint display to DDT. There were also user interface layout upgrades, the addition of tooltip documentation, histogram improvements, automatic color assignment in Astroview, and VO SAMP broadcast of spectral data. The team endeavored to work toward a schedule that concluded with releases in June and October 2012. A quick patch was released in December with several small upgrades that further supported our AAS demonstrations at the Long Beach meeting in January. See Table 4-1 for development highlights. DDT Version

Release Date

Highlight

V1.3

25 June 2012

Spectral data handling; Add Astroview display; Layout upgrades

V1.4

08 October 2012

Auto color assignment; Metadata tooltips, Histogram zooming

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DDT Version

Release Date

Highlight

V1.4.1

19 December 2012

DDT query length handling; Image icon enhancement to display

V1.5

May 2013 (Working)

Metadata preservation in table data

Table 4-1: The Data Discovery tool 2012 development highlights. Feedback to DDT has been positive and we have found it is often the first step in any discovery of multi-wavelength data for further analysis in the VAO.

4.2 Interoperable SED Access and Analysis (Iris) Iris enables astronomers to build and analyze wide-band Spectral Energy Distributions (SEDs). The tool combines key features of several existing astronomical software applications to streamline and enhance the SED analysis process. With Iris, users may read in and display SEDs, select data ranges for analysis, fit models to SEDs, and calculate confidence limits on best-fit parameters. SED data may be uploaded into the application in a variety of file formats, including IVOA-compliant VOTable and FITS format files, or retrieved directly from NED (the NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database). The project guidelines included utilizing Specview from STScI for SED visualization and Sherpa from SAO for spectral fitting. The VO SAMP protocol was used to make the connection.

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Figure 4-2. The SED Access and Analysis tool Iris in operations. The Iris Desktop holds the interactive windows for SED data review and analysis.

Version 1.1 of Iris was released in Aug 2012. A new Iris desktop was completed along with support for Photometry Catalogs and Photometry points. Support for custom models, a metadata browser, and interoperability with VO SAMP completed the Iris enhancements. In December, version 1.2 was released and focused on visualization upgrades along with plug-in support. Plug-in capabilities enable extensibility by allowing science users to add their own functions to Iris. One collaborative plug-in developed by the ASDC group in Rome is packaged with Iris as an example for users. Current development is targeted for a May 2013 release with further enhancements that include co-plotting, redshifting/blue-shifting, interpolation, and calculation of integrated quantities. The user community has responded well to the tool, with approximately 350 downloads in 2012 and more than 150 Iris downloads in 2013 so far. Iris Version

Release Date

Highlight

V1.1

22 Aug 2012

Desktop, metadata browser, VO SAMP

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Iris Version

Release Date

Highlight

V1.2

19 Dec 2012

Visualization updates, plug-in support

V2.0

May 2013

Co-plotting, redshift/blueshift, interpolation, integrated quantities, smoothing

(Working)

Table 4-2: Iris 2012 development highlights.

Figure 4-3. The SED Access and Analysis tool Iris in operation. The window to the left shows the plot of a SED with the fit overlaid in red; the window to the right is where the user builds custom model expressions used for fitting.

4.3 Catalog Cross-Comparison Service The Scalable Cross-Comparison (SCC) Service performs fast positional crossmatches between an input table of up to 1 million sources and common astronomical source catalogs for a user-specified match radius. The service returns a list of cross-identifications to the user. The output is a composite table consisting

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of records from the first table, joined to all the matching records in the second table, and the angular distance and position angles of the matches. The tool reached version 1 release status in April 2012 after an initial Beta release the previous December. Upgrades to the user display, documentation and the addition of the WISE catalog were completed. We followed up with a December 2012 release that featured the addition of several catalogs and an enhancement to make the SCC service VO SAMP-enabled. The current effort is adding the SDSS DR9 catalog to the SCC. A catalog upgrade entails re-indexing the catalog for quick searches and making that new index available to users through the tool. See Table 4-3 for development highlights. SCC Version

Release Date

Highlight

V1.0

Apr 18 2012

User display updates, added WISE catalog, address timeout issue, improve documentation

V1.1

Dec 19 2012

Added survey catalogs (PPMX, DENIS3, UCAC3, TYCHO2), SAMP enhancement

V1.2

April 2013

Add DR9 catalog

(Working)

Table 4-3: SCC service 2012 development highlights.

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5 Standards and Infrastructure Responding further to NSF/NASA feedback, our revised Project Execution Plan (PEP) reorganizes our ongoing infrastructure and standards development around five initiatives. These initiatives were chosen to ensure a strong and stable infrastructure as we transition out of the current VAO funding program. This includes libraries and tools that make it easier for archives and science teams to publish data in a highly compliant manner. We're also emphasizing libraries that enable the community to create new VO applications. Two of our initiatives take VO infrastructure to an important next level: supporting multidimensional image cubes that will characterize the emerging generation of advanced telescopes and encouraging sharing and publication of small collections.

5.1 IVOA Standards Development In this section we will discuss the progress related to the development of international stands through our participation in the IVOA standardization process. This effort comes primarily in the authoring, editing, and review of the standards documents, in collaboration with our international partners. Many of these standards are central to our infrastructure development efforts and thus are referred to in other sections this document.

5.1.1 VAO Participation The VAO continues to provide strong leadership in IVOA. This year, M. Graham (Caltech) became the vice-chair of the Technical Coordination Group (TCG) which coordinates the standardization process for across all of the technical working groups. G. Greene (STScI) continues as the Registry Working Group chair, M. Fitzpatrick (NOAO) is now the Data Access Layer Work Group vicechair, and O. Laurino (Harvard/CfA) is the vice-chair of the Data Models Working Group. This year we had strong attendance at the IVOA meetings to generally help the advancement of all documents and to report on our use of existing and emerging standards in our products. In particular, Evans and Laurino demonstrated the Iris tool for SED analysis, highlighting the use of the spectral and photometry data models and the need for an SED access protocol. D. Nandrekar and R. Plante have reported on their experience building the TAPServer toolkit.

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5.1.2 Completed Documents The following are IVOA standards that completed the standardization process this year to become Recommendations with contributions from the VAO project.

REGISTRY STANDARDS: StandardsRegExt 1.0 – This extends the registry metadata to allow our standards to be registered and discovered. Not only can this point users to the documents that define the standard services in the registry, it enables the definition of standard keywords that allow clients to use these services. (Contributions provided by Plante and Greene.) SimpleDALRegExt 1.0 – This defines the set of registry metadata extensions that describe the four standard “simple” data access services for discovering catalog sources (ConeSearch), images (SIA), spectra (SSA), and spectral line data (SLAP). (Contributions provided by Plante, Dower, Greene, and Tody.) TAPRegExt 1.0 – This extends the registry metadata to describe standard Table Access Protocol services. (Contributions provided by Dower, Greene, and Fitzpatrick.)

GRID AND WEB SERVICES: VOSpace 2.0 –This protocol provides access to data stored in a remote storage system; the primary improvement over version 1.0 is that it now presents a “restful” interface. (Contributions from Graham and Mishin.)

DATA MODELS Photometry Data Model 1.0 – This model describes such things as “photometry filters, photometric systems, magnitude systems, zero points” (from the standard document's abstract). This model will be important for describing spectral energy distribution (SED) data as well as the component data used to build SEDs. Other documents completed with minor contributions from the VAO include VOTable 1.3 (table file format), SAMP 1.3 (application messaging protocol), and SimDB 1.0 (data model describing simulations).

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Documents In Process – Other documents driven by VAO contributions also made significant progress this year. The Iris SED analysis tool relies heavily on several data models, including the Spectral Data Model v2.0; completing this document is required to complete an SED data access protocol. M. CresitelloDittmar (Harvard/CfA) has led the editing of this document with significant contributions from the Iris development team (O. Laurino, J. D. Evans, R. D'Abrusco). UTypes 1.0, critical to many applications, describes how to define standard labels that can be applied to data to indicate which quantities from a data model they represent. O. Laurino (Harvard/CfA) has been participating in an IVOA Tiger Team to progress this standard. The Registry Working Group has been looking at revising the Registry search interfaces, and the VAO has this year been participating in the prototyping work. G. Greene has been leading the development of a standard for footprint access. Simple Image Access v2.0, which extends support for multi-dimensional cubes, has also been a major focus this past year; we discuss this below.

5.2 Data Sharing and Publishing In this section, we describe infrastructure development related to publishing data in the VO, which is a unifying theme of three of the four work areas described in the revised PEP. In summary, these projects include toolkits that make it easier to publish data through standard services (the DALServer and TAPServer toolkits); upgrades to the registry that not only make it easier for data providers to share their services, but also for researchers to make it easier to discover and use these services; a storage service platform for sharing data between research collaborators as well as for publishing small collections; and an initiative to support access to multi-dimensional image cubes. TAPServer Toolkit – D. Nandrekar (JHU) has been completing the toolkit that makes it easier for data providers to expose a catalog through the standard Table Access Protocol (TAP). Testing and release of the first production release is scheduled for late spring 2013. Earlier this year, Plante demonstrated this work at the LSST All-Hands meeting in which the TAPServer toolkit was used to expose an LSST Data Challenge catalog, making it searchable through the TAP client application, Seleste. Nandrekar worked with astronomers at the University of Marseille to test use of the toolkit for catalog publishing. We are now collaborating with astronomers at STScI (led by M. Meixner) to use the toolkit to publish their SAGE catalog of cross-matched sources from the Magellanic Clouds.

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Related to this work is the DALServer Toolkit, which makes it easier to publish images, spectra, and catalogs to the VO. Further work is planned on this product beginning this summer in conjunction with the Data Cube initiative. Registry Upgrade – With the completion of several new Registry metadata standards, we are now working to integrate those into the current registry at STScI. We are also looking ahead to new registry search interfaces being considered by the IVOA. A key interface is one based on TAP using a standard data model. Over the last year and a half, the IVOA has been developing a database schema based on the existing registry metadata standards. Since the new metadata standards and the new search interfaces being proposed both require rebuilding our registry's underlying database, we are combining efforts to support both in a coordinated effort. Dower, Greene (STScI) and Plante (NCSA) are collaborating on this work, and a beta version will be ready for the May IVOA meeting. A beta release will be available for users in the early summer for a public release in July. Completing this upgrade this year is critical for establishing a stable registry system that can be maintained at low cost after the end of the VAO project. Publisher's Registration Tool – How data providers describe their collections is critical to how easily they can be discovered by astronomers. To make it easier for providers to not only register their collections and services to the VO but also to describe them effectively, T. Dower (STScI) developed registration interface for data providers. It provides a “wizard”-type interface which, through a series of panels, prompts the data provider for key information about the collections and services they want to share to the VO. This year, we completed an initial round of early testing to inform the final work. Completion of this product is being coordinated with the Registry upgrade described above. This tool will play a key in our campaign to improve the registry resource description planned for later this summer. In related work, Dower and M. Preciado (HEASARC) have implemented a process for evaluating compliance of registered services and working to improve their description. In particular, they implemented a policy for identifying services that are no longer supported and deprecating them. VOBox: Platform for Data Sharing and Publishing – VOBox, developed by D. Mishin (JHU), combines the features of Dropbox and VOSpace to provide a VOcompatible network storage platform. In addition to supporting both the Dropbox and VOSpace programmatic interfaces, it features an interactive interface that runs in a browser. This summer, we will be working with a few science partner

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teams (including the CANDELS project) to prototype its use as a tool that allows collaborators to share data. To support this effort, VOBox provides several mechanisms for sharing data, users can simply make collections publicly accessible, they can share a special URL to access normally private data without authentication, and they can make data accessible to fellow group members requiring authentication. Authentication is an important feature for limiting the sharing of data. To support this, we have built the VAO Login Services for federated authentication to VO portals (Plante, Yekkirala; NCSA). This replaces the NVO services already in operation and is built on the community standards OpenID and OAuth. Testing has been completed and it is now going into production deployment. To aid portal developers, NCSA has also created a tool kit (VAOLogins) which makes it easy to support VAO logins. Data Cube Support – Multidimensional data cubes have long been a product of radio telescopes and some optical imaging spectrographs; however, these will be central to the new observatories coming online in the next decade, including ALMA, JWST and LSST. These products will quite large and complex and simple file-based download mechanisms will be a practical means for accessing them. To enable effective access to this type of data in the VO, we have launched an initiative to create and support a revision of the Simple Image Access (SIA) Protocol, which will continue into the last year of the VAO. Led by M. Graham (Caltech) and D. Tody (NRAO), we began this effort in this last year by collecting use cases from the VAO observatory partners. These will be shared with the IVOA at the spring meeting. The SIA version 2 working draft was revised, and we have laid out a schedule for moving it to a proposed Recommendation status by next year. This includes an initial implementation of the protocol within our DALServer toolkit product this summer.

5.2.1 VO on the Desktop Another key component of our final VAO PEP that ensures a solid foundation for the VO in the US is our desktop initiative. By providing key VO development tools, we hope to enable the community to create their own innovative tools that take advantage of VO infrastructure. In particular, we want both developers and computing-savvy astronomers to be able to quickly create scripts that can access the VO. To this end, we have placed a priority on supporting Python and shell (command-line) scripting. We also want to provide some basic libraries that will

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make it possible to integrate VO capabilities into existing astronomical analysis packages as we did previously with IRAF. VOClient – The VOClient package is the central product for our desktop effort. It is designed to provide multi-language APIs built on top of a core library implemented in C. Using this core, a suite of command-line tools have been implemented (by M. Fitzpatrick, NOAO) that can search the registry, search for sources and images, download data, and send data to other desktop tools via SAMP. The first production release, scheduled for spring 2013 will feature this command-line suite. Release testing is currently in progress. The following release will add Python scripting support. Python Scripting Support – As the primary focus of our desktop initiative this year, our Python team (M. Fitzpatrick, M. Graham, R. Plante, D. Tody, and W. Young) have created an initial design for a Python Library API and have laid the groundwork for its implementation in our VOClient product. We have chosen to engage the Python development community early in our process. One of the important pieces of feedback we received was the desire for a “native Python” implementation. This led to a few important changes in our design plans. First, we would create a native Python implementation of the low-level API that allows developers and astronomers simple access to VO services and the registry. Second, this same capability would made available in the C-based Python interface built into VOClient but would also provide higher-level capabilities (SAMP, data caching, asynchronous access) necessary for building more complex applications the scale across many sources and many archives. Third, we would have the native implementation and the VOClient implementation follow a common API. The team has designed the API and the accompanying documentation and is now collecting feedback on it from the community. In particular, we are forming a review of the API with participation from developers outside the VAO. R. Plante (NCSA) and M. Graham (Caltech) have completed an initial release of the native implementation of the common API that is being incorporated into our review process as a demonstration. Currently called VAOpy, this package builds on other science packages widely used by the community, including numpy and AstroPy. It allows a developer to find archives through queries to the registry and then find images, spectra, and catalog data offered by those archives. We have shared this library with external developers for feedback. The production release will be made this summer. Meanwhile, Tody, Young, and Fitzpatrick have commenced work on adding Python support to VOClient.

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There are two important concerns we are keeping in mind for this work. First, we want to make sure we produce products that will be truly useful to the Python developer community, including research astronomers. This is the motivation behind our engaging the community during development. The second concern is ensuring these products can be maintained in the community after the close-out of the VAO project. Because of the importance of VOClient to observatory infrastructure at NOAO and NRAO, we expect those institutions to take up maintenance of VOClient. For the VAOpy product, we reached out to the AstroPy development team. AstroPy has an active developer community that continues to add new capabilities into the package; there is currently interest in adding VO support. For this reason, we have been discussing with them how our VAOpy work could be merged or otherwise encourage take-up within the AstroPy community. We agreed to establish our products as what they term an AstroPy affiliated project. Not only does this make AstroPy users aware of our products, it provides a forum for migrating capabilities into the AstroPy core. There are several other affiliated projects that provide a good model for our code, demonstrating how to ensure longevity of the software in the community.

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Appendix A. Presentations and Publications B. Berriman, “Adoption of Software by a User Community: The Montage Image Mosaic Engine Example,” Workshop on Maintainable Software Practices in eScience, October 9, 2012. R. Hanisch, “The Research Tools of the Virtual Astronomical Observatory,” Sociedade Astronômica Brasileira XXXVII Reunião Anual, Aguas de Lindoia, October 17, 2012. M. Fitzpatrick, “An Introduction to VO-IRAF,” Sociedade Astronômica Brasileira XXXVII Reunião Anual, Aguas de Lindoia, October 17, 2012. M. Graham, “The Transient Sky and the Virtual Observatory,” Sociedade Astronômica Brasileira XXXVII Reunião Anual, Aguas de Lindoia, October 17, 2012. A. Szalay, “Extreme Data-Intensive Computing in Astrophysics,” ADASS XXII, University of Illinois, November 5, 2012. M. Fitzpatrick, “VO Desktop Tools: IRAF, Command-Line Tasks, and Python,” ADASS XXII, University of Illinois, November 5, 2012. B. Berriman, “A Tale of 160 Scientists, Three Applications, A Workshop, and a Cloud,” ADASS XXII, University of Illinois, November 7, 2012. O. Laurino, I. Busko, M. Cresitillo-Dittmar, R. D’Abrusco, S. Doe, J. Evans, O. Pevunova, “Extending Iris, the VAO SED Analysis Tool,” ADASS XXII, University of Illinois, November 5, 2012. D. Fan, T. Budavari, “Efficient Catalog Matching with Dropout Identification,” ADASS XXII, University of Illinois, November 5, 2012. M. Graham, G. Djorgovski, A. Mahabal, C. Donalek, A. Drake, “Automatic Discovery of Relationships in Astronomy,” AAS Meeting 221, 240.05, January 8, 2013. R. Hanisch, B. Berriman, J. Lazio, “The Research Tools of the Virtual Astronomical Observatory,” AAS Meeting 221, 240.21, January 8, 2013.

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Presentations and Publications

A. Muench, S. Emery Bunn, “The Virtual Astronomical Observatory User Forum,” AAS Meeting 221, 240.22, January 8, 2013. T. Donaldson, D. Hinshaw, A. Rogers, G. Wallace, “Discovering Data in the Virtual Observatory,” AAS Meeting 221, 240.23, January 8, 2013. M. Fitzpatrick, D. Tody, “Desktop Tools for the Virtual Observatory,” AAS Meeting 221, 240.24, January 8, 2013.

D. Van Stone, P. Harbo, M. Tibbetts, P. Zografou, “Data Discovery and Exploration with Seleste,” AAS Meeting 221, 240.25, January 8, 2013. B. Berriman, R. Hanisch, J. Lazio, “The Role of the Virtual Astronomical Observatory in the Era of Big Data,” AAS Meeting 221, 240.27, January 8, 2013. D. Tody, M. Fitzpatrick, M. Graham, W. Young, “Scripting the Virtual Observatory in Python,” AAS Meeting 221, 240.34, January 8, 2013. G. Greene, J. Donley, S. Rodney, J. Lazio, A. Koekemoer, I. Busko, R. Hanisch, “VAO Tools Enhance CANDELS Research Productivity,” AAS Meeting 221, 240.35, January 8, 2013. R. Plante, D. Mishin, J. Lazio, A. Muench, “Data Sharing and Publishing Using the Virtual Astronomical Observatory,” AAS Meeting 221, 240.36, January 8, 2013. R. Kinne, M. Templeton, A. Henden, P. Zografou, P. Harbo, J. Evans, A. Rots, J. Lazio, “Distributing Variable Star Data to the Virtual Observatory,” AAS Meeting 221, 240.37, January 8, 2013. O. Laurino, I. Busko, M. Cresitillo-Dittmar, R. D’Abrusco, S. Doe, J. Evans, O. Pevunova, P. Norris, “Constructing and Analyzing Spectral Energy Distributions with the Virtual Observatory,” AAS Meeting 221, 240.38, January 8, 2013.

B. Berriman, “Astronomy in the Cloud,” .Astronomy 4 conference, Heidelberg, Germany, July 9- 11. B. Berriman, “Adoption of Software by a User Community: The Montage Image Mosaic Engine Example,” IEEE e-Science Meeting, Chicago, October 8-12, 2012.

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Presentations and Publications

R. Hanisch, “Virtual Observatory-Enabled Research,” The Evolving Universe conference at Catholic University, Washington, DC, July 17, 2012.

R. J. Hanisch, “Astronomical Data: Virtual and Real, Shared and Open.” Open Access Symposium, University of North Texas, Denton. May 2012. G. B. Berriman and E. Deelman. “How To Use Cloud Computing To Do Astronomy.” Caltech Seminar Series, May 2012. G. B. Berriman et all, “The organization and management of the Virtual Astronomical Observatory.” Submitted to SPIE Conference 8449: Modeling, Systems Engineering, and Project Management for Astronomy V, June 2012 (http://arxiv.org/abs/1206.4079v1). G. B. Berriman R. J. Hanisch, T. J. W. Lazio, “The role of the Virtual Astronomical Observatory in the era of massive data sets.” SPIE Conference 8448: Observatory Operations: Strategies, Processes, and Systems IV, June 2012 (http://arxiv.org/abs/1206. 4076v1) J. Evans et al., “Managing distributed software development in the Virtual Astronomical Observatory.” SPIE Conference 8449: Modeling, Systems Engineering, and Project Management for Astronomy V, June 2012. (http://arxiv.org/abs/1206.6161) T. A. McGlynn et al., “Running a distributed virtual observatory: US Virtual Astronomical Observatory operations.” SPIE Conference 8448: Observatory Operations: Strategies, Processes, and Systems IV, June 2012. (http://arxiv.org/abs/1206.4493v1) M. J. Graham et al., “Connecting the time domain community with the Virtual Astronomical Observatory.” SPIE Conference 8448: Observatory Operations: Strategies, Processes, and Systems IV, June 2012. (http://arxiv.org/abs/1206.4035) R. J. Williams et al. 2012. “Responding to the Event Deluge.” Submitted to SPIE Conference 8448: Observatory Operations: Strategies, Processes, and Systems IV (http://arxiv.org/abs/1206.0236v1) R. Plante, “Using VO TAP Services to Publish Source Catalogs.” Dark Energy Survey Team Meeting, Munich, May 2012. R. J. Hanisch, “Report on the Virtual Astronomical Observatory.” AURA Board of Directors and Member Representatives Meeting, Washington, DC, April 2012. R. J. Hanisch, “The Virtual Astronomical Observatory.” NASA Headquarters, April 2012.

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Appendix B. Participants Name   Berriman, Graham Bruce Busko, Ivo Claro, Maricel Cresitello-Dittmar, Mark D’Abrusco, Raffaele Dave, Rahul Djorgovski, George Doe, Stephen Donaldson, Tom Dower, Theresa Drake, Andrew Ebert, Ricardo Economou, Frossie Emery Bunn, Sarah Evans, Janet Fabbiano, Guissepina Fitzpatrick, Michael Good, John Graham, Matthew Greene, Gretchen Hanisch, Robert Harbut, Marcy Hinshaw, Dean Huffman, Marie Johnson, Avalon Lazio, Joseph Laurino, Omar Low, Stephen Mahabal, Ashish

VAO Annual Report 1 May 2012 – 30 April 2013

Role  

Effort   (%)  

Organization  

Program Manager, IPAC Manager, Chair Program Council Software Developer Interim Business Manager

0.50

IPAC

0.15 0.50

Software Developer Post-doctoral research fellow Computational scientist Scientist Software Developer Software Engineer Software Developer Scientist Software Engineer Operations User Support – Documentation Manager, Operations Software Development Manager Scientist, Chair of Science Council Software Engineer Software Engineer Scientist, Software Developer; Program Council representative System Engineer; Program Council representative Director Technical Writer and Documentation Support Software Developer Business Manager System Administrator Project Scientist Software Developer VAO/IVOA Hardware Scientist, Software Developer

0.09 0.90 0.25 0.02 0.09 0.30 0.50 0.10 0.10 0.08 0.50

STScI VAO, LLC (Robert Half) SAO SAO SAO Caltech SAO STScI STScI Caltech IPAC NOAO Caltech

0.20 −

SAO SAO

0.55 0.50 0.45

NOAO IPAC Caltech

0.15

STScI

0.60 0.15

STScI IPAC

0.40 0.40 0.05 0.25 0.45 0.04 0.10

HEASARC AUI Caltech IPAC SAO Caltech Caltech

39

Participants

Name   McGlynn, Tom Mishin, Dmitry Muench, Gus

Nandrekar-Heinis, Deoyani Norris, Patrick Pevunova, Olga Plante, Raymond Preciado, Michael Rots, Arnold Stobie, Elizabeth Szalay, Alex Thakar, Ani Thompson, Randy Tody, Doug

Yenkkirala, Venkat Young, Wes

Role  

Effort   (%)  

Organization  

Lead, Operations; Program Council representative Software Developer User Support – Portal QA&T Lead, Forum Lead, Documentation Software Developer

0.35

HEASARC

0.50 0.06

JHU SAO

0.50

JHU

Test Engineer Software Engineer Lead, Product Development; Program Council representative Operations Program Council representative

0.45 0.45 0.80

NOAO IPAC NCSA

1.00 −

HEASARC SAO

Lead, User Support; Program Council representative Technical Advisor, Member of VAO Executive Deputy, Operations; Program Council representative Software Engineer Deputy Lead, Standards and Protocols; Program Council representative Software Developer Software Engineer

0.17

NOAO

0.01

JHU

0.10

JHU

0.10 1.00

STScI NRAO

0.25 0.25

NCSA NRAO

− indicates in-kind contribution

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Participants

Appendix C. Acronyms and Abbreviations Full Name Term

(proper nouns are capitalized)

2MASS

Two Micron All Sky Survey

AAAS

American Association for the Advancement of Science

Definition

American Astronomical

AAS

Society

ADEC

Astronomy Data Centers Executive Council

ADQL

Astronomical Data Query Language

ADS

NASA Astrophysics Data System Virtual Library A compact region at the center of a galaxy that has a much higher luminosity over at least some portion, and possibly all, of the electromagnetic spectrum.

AGN

active galactic nucleus (or nuclei)

AIP/SPS

American Institute of Physics/Society of Physics Students A software package by NRAO used for interactive and batch calibration and editing of radio interferometric data, and for the calibration, construction, display and analysis of astronomical images made from those data using Fourier synthesis methods.

Astronomical Image

AIPS

Processing System

ALMA

An array of 66 high-precision antennae located in Chile used for submillimeter observing.

Atacama Large Millimeter Array

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Acronyms and Abbreviations

Full Name Term

(proper nouns are capitalized)

Definition

A popular web site that showcases an astronomical photo each day. The site is a service of NASA’s Astrophysics Science Division (ASD) and Michigan Technological University

APOD

Astronomy Picture of the Day

APS

American Physical Society

arXiv

Pronounced as “archive,” with the X as a hard K sound as in “LaTex”

AUI

Associated Universities, Inc.

AURA

Associated Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc.

An automated electronic archive and distribution server for research articles. Maintained and operated by the Cornell University Library.

A group of interrelated web development methods used on the clientside to create interactive web applications. With Ajax, web applications can retrieve data from the server asynchronously in the background without interfering with the display and behavior of the existing page.

Ajax

ASCL

Astronomy Source Code Library

ASKAP

Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder A system that automates the compile/test cycle required by most software projects to validate code changes. By automatically rebuilding and testing the tree each time something has changed, build problems are pinpointed quickly, before other developers are inconvenienced by the failure.

BuildBot

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Acronyms and Abbreviations

Full Name Term

(proper nouns are capitalized)

CACR

CANDELS

CASA

Definition

Center for Advanced Computing Research Cosmic Assembly/Nearinfrared Deep Extragalactic Legacy Survey A software packaged developed by NRAO with the goal of supporting the data post-processing needs of the next generation of radio astronomical telescopes.

Common Astronomy Software Applications

Centre de donneés CDS

astronomiques de Strasbourg Canada France Hawaii

CFHT

Telescope

CIAO

From “s’sciavo,” meaning “I am your servant” in Italian (Venetian dialect)

Software developed to analyze data returned by the Chandra X-ray Observatory.

CIS

continuous integration system

A system that periodically and automatically builds a software tool and (possibly) runs its unit tests.

CiTO

Citation Typing Ontology

An ontology for describing the nature of reference citations in scientific research articles and other scholarly works.

CM

configuration management, or Configuration Manager

COROT

A European space mission that searches for extrasolar planets with short orbital periods, and performs asteroseismology by measure solarlike oscillations in stars.

COnvection ROtation and planetary Transits

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Acronyms and Abbreviations

Full Name Term

(proper nouns are capitalized)

COSMA

Definition

Cosmic Sky Machine for Astrophysics Catalina Real Time Survey (CRTS)

CRTS

CUDA

A proprietary parallel computing architecture that enables dramatic increases in computing performance by harnessing the power of the GPU (graphics processing unit).

Compute Unified Device Architecture

CXC

Chandra X-Ray Observatory

DALServer

Data Access Layer Server

DM

data mining A variety of activities conducted by research institutes, universities, and institutions such as science museum that are aimed at promoting public awareness and understanding of science.

Education and Public

EPO

Outreach

EVLA

Expanded Very Large Array

GAVO

German Astrophysical Virtual Observatory

GALEX

Galaxy Evolution Explorer

GPU

graphical processing units

VAO Annual Report 1 May 2012 – 30 April 2013

An array of 27 antennas with 25meter diameters that is located in New Mexico.

An orbiting, ultraviolet space telescope launched in April 2003 to determine the distances of several hundred thousand galaxies, as well as the rate of star formation in each galaxy.

44

Acronyms and Abbreviations

Full Name Term

(proper nouns are capitalized)

Also known as the Hubble Space Telescope, Guide Catalog (HSTGC). It is a star catalog compiled to support HST with targeting off-axis stars.

GSC2

Guide Star Catalogue II

GSFC

Goddard Space Flight Center

GWS

Grid and Web Services

HCO

Harvard College Observatory

HEASARC

High Energy Astrophysics Science Archive Research Center

Hudson HST

Definition

An open-source build server. Hubble Space Telescope A multi-mission center of expertise for long-wavelength astrophysics that carries out data-intensive processing tasks for NASA's infrared and sub-millimeter astronomy programs.

Infrared Processing and

IPAC

Analysis Center

A general purpose software system for the reduction and analysis of astronomical data.

Image Reduction and

IRAF

Analysis Facility

An online archive of data and science products for NASA’s infrared and sub-millimeter missions.

IRSA

Infrared Science Archive

IVOA Interoperability Meeting

International Virtual Observatory Alliance Interoperability meeting

IVOA TCG

International Virtual Observatory Alliance Technical Coordination Group

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A group composed of the Chairs and Vice Chairs of IVOA working group and interest groups that reviews and proposed IVOA recommendations.

Acronyms and Abbreviations

Full Name Term

(proper nouns are capitalized)

Definition

A compiled programming language that allows application developers to write code that can run on any platform.

Java

JIRA

Truncation of "Gojira," the Japanese name for Godzilla

JPL

Jet Propulsion Laboratory

LLC

A flexible form of business enterprise that blends elements of partnership and corporate structures. It is a legal form of a company that provides limited liability to its owners within the vast majority of United States jurisdictions.

limited liability company

A facility that will produce a widefield astronomical survey of the Universe using an 8.4-meter groundbased telescope.

Large Synoptic Survey

LSST

Telescope

MAST

Multimission Archive at Space Telescope

MoU

Memorandum of Understanding

NASA

National Aeronautics Space Administration

NCSA

National Center for Supercomputing Applications An online, knowledge-based database and archive for extra-galactic astronomy.

NASA/IPAC Extragalactic

NED

Database

NOAO

A proprietary issue-tracking product the VAO will use as its help desk issue/bug tracking system.

National Optical Astronomical Observatory

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Acronyms and Abbreviations

Full Name Term

(proper nouns are capitalized)

Definition

NRAO

National Radio Astronomy Observatory

NSF

National Science Foundation

NStED

NASA/IPAC/NExScI Star and Exoplanet Database

NVO

National Virtual Observatory

MERLIN

Multi-Element Radio Linked Interferometer Network

PEP

Project Execution Plan

PI

Principal Investigator

PQL

Program Query Language

A programming language for expressing patterns of events on objects.

ObsCore

Observation Core

An IVOA data model that describes the necessary metadata for multiwavelength data discovery queries.

ObsTAP

Observation Table Access Protocol

A general purpose stellar and exoplanet archive to support NASA's planet finding and characterization activities.

Python

An open source, interpreted, objectoriented programming language.

PQL

Program Query Language

A language for expressing patterns of events on objects. It provides a front end to static and dynamic program analyses to go find those sequences on the program as it runs.

OPO

Office of Public Outreach

REST

REpresentational State Transfer

VAO Annual Report 1 May 2012 – 30 April 2013

A style of software architecture for distributed hypermedia systems, such as the World Wide Web.

47

Acronyms and Abbreviations

Full Name Term

(proper nouns are capitalized)

Definition

RLG

Research Libraries Group

A U.S.-based library consortium that developed standards and tools for computerized library systems. It merged with OCLC in 2006.

SAMP

Simple Application Messaging Protocol

A messaging protocol that enables astronomy software tools to interoperate and communicate.

SAO

Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory

SEDs

Spectral Energy Distributions

SemDB

Data-Literature Semantic Database

SDSS

Sloan Digital Sky Survey

SHA

Spitzer Heritage Archive

The interface to all data gathered by the Spitzer Space Telescope.

Sherpa

A modeling and fitting software tool that is part of the CIAO software packaged developed by Chandra Xray Observatory

SIAPV2

The second generation of an IVOA standard that defines a protocol for retrieving image data from a variety of astronomical image repositories through a uniform interface.

Simple Image Access Protocol 2

SkyAlert

A clearinghouse of VOEvent notices that individuals may subscribe to and/or monitor from various event streams and feeds.

SSO

Technology that allows users to gain access to multiple systems using a single, central authentication method or interface.

single sign-on

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Acronyms and Abbreviations

Full Name Term

(proper nouns are capitalized)

SIMBAD

Set of Identifications, Measurements, and Bibliography for Astronomical Data

SMC

Small Magellanic Cloud

Definition

An astronomical database that provides basic data, crossidentifications and a bibliography for astronomical objects outside the solar system.

Solr

An open-source search server based on the Lucene Java search library.

Specview

A tool developed at STScI for 1-D spectral visualization and analysis of astronomical spectrograms.

STScI

TA

Space Telescope Science Institute One of the seven work areas of the VAO project that advises the VAO on technology choices that best support VAO goals.

Technology Assessment

TAP

TSC

Table Access Protocol

A VO standard that defines a service protocol for accessing general table data, including astronomical catalog and general database tables.

Time Series Center

A project at Harvard University dedicated to creating the world’s largest data center for time series, and developing algorithms to understand various aspects of those time series. A type of database that is very efficient at storing character information. Queries consist of short, three-part statements (subjectpredicate-object).

triplestore (also TripleStore)

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Acronyms and Abbreviations

Full Name Term

USNO-B

(proper nouns are capitalized)

Definition

United States Naval

An all-sky catalog of digitized photographic plates from observations covering the years 1949-2002.

Observatory B1.0 catalog

An IVOA specification that defines how to manage asynchronous execution of jobs on a service.

UWS

Universal Worker Service

VAO

Virtual Astronomical Observatory

VAO, LLC

Virtual Astronomical Observatory, Limited Liability Corporation

VO-CLI

Virtual Observatory Command Line Interface

VO

Virtual Observatory

VAOBase

Virtual Astronomical Observatory Base ontology

VAOBib

Virtual Astronomical Observatory Bibliographic ontology

VAOObserv

Virtual Astronomical Observatory Observational Ontology

VOClient

VOG

A set of tools developed by the NVO that use a command-line interface.

Virtual Observatory Client

A software package that provides a high-level, programmable interface between desktop applications and the distributed VO framework, providing access to remote VO data and services, reference implementations for VO data-providers and enduser applications.

VAO Oversight Group

A group convened by NSF Division of Astronomical Sciences (AST) to provide oversight of the VAO and act as a point-of-contact for NSF and NASA and the Project Director.

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Acronyms and Abbreviations

Full Name Term

(proper nouns are capitalized)

Definition

VOSI

Virtual Observatory Support Interfaces

VOSpace

Virtual Observatory Space

The IVOA interface to distributed storage.

VOView

Virtual Observatory View

A web utility used to view large data tables within a web browser.

WBS

Work Breakdown Structure

A definition and description of a project’s discrete work elements and tasks that helps organize and define the total work scope of the project.

WSBP

Web Services Basic Profile

WISE

Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer

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A space telescope that is scanning the entire sky in infrared light to photograph distant objects.

Acronyms and Abbreviations