ADASS and Interop

ADASS XXIX is a big conference with lots of attendants. I've taken the liberty of scaling the photo so you really won't recognise me (though I am on the photo). Note that, regrettably, the interop will be a lot smaller.

The people that create the Virtual Observatory standards, organised in the IVOA, meet twice a year: Once in spring for a five-day meeting (this year it happened in Paris), and once in autumn for a three-day meeting back-to-back to ADASS, the venerable (this year it's the 29th installment) meeting of people dealing with astronomy and computers.

We're now on day three of ADASS, and for me, so far this has been more or an endless hackathon, with discussing and hacking on things like mirrors for DFBS, ADQL 2.1, the evolution of IVOA vocabularies (more on this soon somewhere around here), a vocabulary of object types, getting LAMOST 5 published properly in the VO, the measurements data model, convincing more registries to push out space-time coverage for their resources (I'm showing a poster on that), and a lot more.

So, getting to actually listen to talks during ADASS almost is something of a luxury, and a mind-widening at that – I've just listend to a talk about effectively doubling the precision of VLBI geodesy (in this case, measuring the location of radio telescopes to a few millimeters) by a piece of clever software, and before that I could learn a bit about how complex it is to figure out how much interference something emitting radio waves will cause in some other place on earth (like, well, a radio telescope). In case you're curious: A bit more than a year from now, short papers on the topics will appear in the proceedings of ADASS XXIX, which in turn you'll find in the ADASS proceedings collections (or on arXiv before that).

Given the experience of the last few days, I doubt I'll do anything like the live blog from Paris linked above. I still can't resist mentioning that at ADASS, I'm having a poster that's little more than an ad blitz for STC in the registry.

Update (2019-10-13): Well, one week later I'm sitting in the closing session of the Interop, and I've even already given my summary of Semantics activities during the interop. Other topics I've talked about at this interop include interoperable authentication (I'm really interested in this because I'd like to enable persistent TAP uploads, where your uploaded tables are still there for you when you come back), a minor update to SimpleDALRegExt (which is overall rather technical and you probably don't want to look at), on the takeup of new Registry tech (which might come over as somewhat sad, but considering that you have to pull along many people to have changes in “the” Registry, it's not so bad at all), and on, as Mark Taylor called it, operational identification of server software (which I consider entertaining in its somewhat erratic narrative).

And now, after 7 days of essential nonstop discussion and brainstorming, I'm longing to slump into a chair on the train back to Heidelberg and just enjoy the landscape rolling by.