ADASS and Interop in Görlitz

Update: Soapbox (2025-11-12)

We have heard a lot of talks again advertising one “science platform“ or other here at ADASS. I fairly invariably cringe when watching them because to me these platforms are (usually) the return to the old „data silos“ (where someone sat on a bunch of tapes or later disks and handed out data on request if you politely asked and had some way to divine it was there), except that now people not only control the metadata and data but also who can perform which sort of computation until when.

Even worse: Something you developed on one such platform will almost never work on the next platform; it will also break at the platform operators' discretion, and even the data you worked with will be gone at the whim of the platform operators or, more frequently, their funders.

Against that, I'm a strong believer in Mike Masnick's 2019 credo Protocols, Not Platforms – which of course is also underlying the much older IVOA; back in 2000, it would have been “protocols, not FTP Servers“, and a little later “protocols, not data silos“.

Let's try really hard to keep the user in control of their data and execution environments.

„But, but“, I hear you pant, „nobody can download our petabytes or data“.

Sure. Nor should they. You can do exciting things with the dozens-of-Terabyte (soon to be roughly-a-Petabyte) Gaia data from a tiny little device thanks to TAP, because you can select and aggregate using standard protocols (“learn once, use anywhere“) on the server side – and then only transfer and store locally not much more than 10 times the data you will eventually use in your research. That is thanks to TAP and ADQL.

For array-like data (images, cubes, and the like) we don't have anything standardised that would be nearly as powerful as TAP and ADQL (well: there is ArraySQL as advertised by me in 2017), which is part why so many people feel compelled to take refuge to platforms. Which is a pity, because all the work that's sunk into these endeavours would be much better spent on developing standards that lets people work with remote arrays through standard protocols.

An example for such standards was just presented here at ADASS: Pierre Fernique talked about “Big data exploration: a hierarchical visualisation solution for cubic surveys“. Check out his talk materials on the talk's ADASS page. In particular before you embark und building yet another platform.

Update: Looking Back at the Interop (2025-11-16)

The 2025 Southern Spring IVOA Interop is now over, and I will freely admit that I took a deep breath when everyone was out of Görlitz' Wichernhaus, where we have discussed the Virtual Observatory's past, present, and future since Friday.

As I had expected, I had too much else to worry about to think about live reporting; and by my standards, I was fairly modest in having talks, too. I was only talking about evolving TAPRegExt (that is rather technical, and the main user-visible change would be that clients like TOPCAT would report more accurate limits as you switch between sync and async modes) and about Plans for Cone Search 2.

This last thing was an outcome of the session on major version transitions at the College Park Interop last June (my coverage of that; and thoughts leading up to it). As promised back then, I have recently sketched what I think it will take to replace one major version of a protocol with another in a draft for SCS2.

I do not think the plan for the standard itself is terribly interesting or creative, but since people have asked why the migration timeframe lasts until 2031 when Google and their ilk shove down changes down their users' throats within half a year if they (the users) are lucky: have a look at Appendix B to get an idea of what it ideally takes if you don't have Google's lock-in and commercial power and you hence have no means of shoving anything down anyone's throat – not the server-side adopters and much less the service users.

In the talk, I have not discussed the plan in all its gory details but only showed the time line from the document:

Mind you: I consider it likely that all of this takes a whole lot longer, in particular because this is only a side project of mine.

And now I will now sink back into my train seat and take a long break. The 7 days of straight conference action are bad enough for normal ADASS+Interop combos. When you are LOC[1] for the Interop, it's quite a bit worse. Heartfelt thanks to my LOC colleagues Daniela, Kai, and Sebastian, without whose help everything would have been a lot messier; running a hybrid conference without the resources of an established university is, let me share that experience with you, nothing for people with my sort of nerves.