[nvo-techwg] Minutes: NVO TWG 2009-04-02

[Douglas Tody]

Hi Matthew -

Thanks for the link.  Is there anything else those of us interested in
this should look at?

On Thu, 2 Apr 2009, Matthew Graham wrote:

> We've had presentations/discussions about VOSpace 2.0 at the last two
> Interops; the most recent was:
> 
> http://www.ivoa.net/internal/IVOA/InterOpOct2008GridAndWebServices/Baltimor
> e-VOSpace-2.0.pdf
> 
> In Baltimore, we put together a list of stakeholders and acknowledged that
> DAL has an interest in this spec. I believe that Keith was going to suggest
> someone when we formed the spec definition group.

It's not just DAL, but also NVO/VOA.  As we have discussed recently we
need to make more of an effort as the facility phase of VO goes forward
to have project use cases / applications drive standards development.

In the TAP discussions over the past year we (NVO) have been the only
ones who seemed all that interested in VOSpace integration into TAP
(at least at this stage) hence we may need to be the ones pushing
this aspect, e.g. in our prototyping over the next year.  I don't
think we can merely sit back and expect that the DAL WG (Keith) will
address this for us - in any case AstroGrid is already very heavily
involved in VOSpace development.  In addition we plan to integrate
VOSpace with SIAV2 for which I am already the lead within DAL.
With VOSpace 2.0 with its REST interface and 2nd generation, hopefully
streamlined functionality going forward in parallel with TAP and SIAV2
it would appear to be the perfect time to do this.

So far as NVO or DAL use cases go we have at least the following:

     o	VOSpace integration into TAP.  We want to colocate a VOSpace
 	with the TAP service, and store tables in it on a per-user
 	basis.	These tables would appear in user queries as a schema,
 	e.g., VOSPACE.tablename.  Tables could be accessed directly
 	from the TAP service as well as via the VOSpace interface.

     o	VOSpace integration into SIAV2.  In this case we have a
 	simple file-oriented integration, storing mainly image
 	files produced by the SIA service, e.g., in async jobs.
 	Upload tables used for multi-position queries would also
 	be possible however.  The VOSpace would probably want to
 	be colocated with the service as for TAP.  TBD is whether
 	multiple services colocated on the same server might share
 	the same VOSpace implementation and context.

     o	VOSpace integration into VOClient and DALServer (these are
     	NVO-specific application use-cases).

     o	Various proposed NVO use cases / applications such as TAP-based
 	replacements for OpenSkyQuery and CASJOBS would use VOSpace
 	(these are probably the primary use cases ultimately for
 	our NVO TAP prototypes using VOSpace).	In particular for a
 	CASJOBS like facility where we can save the output of a query
 	and use it as input in a subsequent query, a per-user VOSpace
 	colocated at the service is required to be able to store the
 	intermediate tables.

     o	Use of VOSpace for observatory or data center data access
 	and retrieval.	For example, we would like to be able to use
 	and rely upon VOSpace and VO authentication for access to
 	proprietary data from NRAO and ALMA telescopes, or for local
 	storage of data on a per-user basis.

I am sure there are others as well, but these are the main ones I am
concerned with.

I just want to make sure that VOSpace 2 will work well for these cases.
So far as I know no one has looked at this carefully yet.

 	- Doug