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Asterics Tech Forum
The 3. Asterics DADI Tech Forum took place last week in Strasbourg - and many GAVO members made contributions as well. This time, there were 3 slots for hackathon sessions, which were also used for discussions. We'll mention two highlights of our contributions here.
We took the opportunity to push our Provenance Data Model efforts and used the hackathon slots for provenance discussions.
One topic was the links between the simulation data model and ProvenanceDM, and how to map from SimDM to ProvenanceDM classes. This mapping works quite well and will be included in the working draft for the data model. We also had an interesting talk by José Enrique Ruiz on his view on Provenance, workflows, and - very important - the "deployer" and "system" provenance for storing all the environment variables that may be needed to rerun the processing of some observational data. Michèle Sanguillon also presented for the first time her extension to the prov Python library (W3C) with extensions from our IVOA Provenance Data Model. We also had interested people from outside the usual provenance-interested people joining in, e.g. from the Astron project. More about our Provenance modelling efforts can be found at IVOA Provenance wiki page.
A world premiere (of sorts) was the first discussion of RegTAP 1.1. RegTAP is a search interface to the VO Registry; it is what TOPCAT or other VO clients uses when you type in keywords to locate services. A fairly direct web-basd interface is our WIRR registry interface. RegTAP will need a bit of a makeover since VOResource, the underlying metadata scheme is currently receiving one, allowing, in particular, for including DOIs and ORCIDs (John Does of this world, rejoice: People can finally uniquely find your data and not that of all the other J. Does) in Registry records and figuring out licenses on data. Licensing may not matter when you use data in a paper but it does matter if you want to redistribute data, e.g. for planetarium programs with catalog data or pretty pictures, or when re-mixing data.
But of course the GAVOistas happily joined the fray on the many other topics discussed, from a standard format for a time series to interoperable authentication, from datalink applications to figuring out if data coming into a program should be treated as a collection of spectra or rather an object catalog – the latter in the context of the upcoming version 10 of the VO's premier image tool Aladin, which we saw (probably another premiere) demoed. We can already promise you an exciting update!