• DaCHS, SODA, and Datalink

    2016-12-12 Markus Demleitner

    DaCHS, the Data Center Helper Suite, is a comprehensive suite for publishing astronomical data to the Virtual Observatory, supporting most major protocols out there. On Dec 12, GAVO released a new version, 0.9.8. The most notable change is that now SODA is supported as specified in the last IVOA Proposed Recommendation.

    This is fairly big news, as SODA is the VO's answer to providing cutout services and the like, which obviously is important part with datasets in the Multi-Gigabyte range and the VO's wider programme of trying to enable users to only download what they need. But even for spectra, which aren't typically terribly large, we have been using SODA; for instance, when you just want to see the development of a single line over time, say,, it's nice to not have to bother with the the full spectrum. The spectral client SPLAT has been offering such functionality for a couple of years now -- watch out for the scissors icon in discovery results. These indicate SODA support on the respective services.

    Another client that will support SODA and its basis Datalink is Aladin – we've seen a promising demo of that during the last Interop in Trieste. Until the clients are there, DaCHS contains a (largely re-usable) stylesheet that generates simple UIs for Datalink documents and SODA services. Some examples:

    Note again that all of these are not actually web pages, they're machine-readable metadata collections; if you don't believe it, pull the URLs with curl. To learn more about the combo of Datalink and SODA, check out this ADASS 2015 poster (preferably before even looking at the not terribly readable standards texts).

    If you're running DaCHS yourself and can't wait to run Datalink and SODA -- here's how to do that.

  • ProvenanceDM Working Draft released

    2016-11-22 Kristin Riebe

    We've released the first version of working draft for the IVOA Provenance Data Model at the IVOA documents page:

    ProvenanceDM Working draft.

    Updated versions will be put at the same URL (check the date! The first version is from 21st November 2016).

    Want to get your hands on the very latest version? Check out the volute svn repository! Since it's not so easy to find what you want there, here's the path to the Provenance Data Model at volute, and here's a direct link to the latest development draft [pdf].

    We're happy to receive some feedback on the document via IVOA's data modelling mailing list dm@ivoa.net.

  • UWS 1.1 approved!

    2016-10-26 Kristin Riebe

    UWS stands for Universal Worker Service and is an IVOA standard provides a protocol which can be used for accessing databases and other web services from the command line, e.g. using the python uws-client. This allows to create (asynchronous) jobs for a web service (e.g. an SQL query), check their status, retrieve their results, abort or delete them.

    The updated version 1.1 was approved at the InterOperability Meeting last week and brings some nice new features:

    • Job list filtering: When retrieving the job list, one can now retrieve only jobs created after a certain date, the latest n jobs or jobs with a certain phase (e.g. EXECUTING or COMPLETED)
    • WAIT: When asking for job details, it is now possible to append a WAIT parameter and provide an integer as wait-time in seconds. This means that the job details will only be returned when the wait-time is over or the job's phase has changed, whichever comes first.

    For all the details, have a look at the standard itself: UWS 1.1 Recommendation.

    A few examples using the CosmoSim database are given here: UWS tutorial for CosmoSim (pdf), using 1.0 and UWS 1.1 update at CosmoSim.

    And if you want to implement UWS 1.1 for your own service, here is a test-tool that may be useful for validating for you for validating the new features: uws-validator.

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