Proceedings of the 2004 NVO Summer School
Introduction
The US National Virtual Observatory Project held the first Applications Software Development Summer School, sponsored by the NSF and NASA. In this week-long, hands-on summer school, participants worked with experienced NVO software developers to become familiar with data discovery, data access, and high performance computing capabilities of the Virtual Observatory. In addition, participants were introduced to VO analysis tools and utilities. In the second half of the session small teams created their own VO-enabled data analysis applications. The summer school was hosted by the Aspen Center for Physics in beautiful Aspen, Colorado.
Presentations
- Introduction to the Summer School (13MB PPT)
- Exploring VO Registries, Resources and Software with The NVO DataScope and Other VO Tools (2.5MB PPT)
- Utilizing VO Standards and Protocols: Clients
- Utilizing VO Standards and Protocols: Server Side
- DataScope Internals and Perl VO modules (~1MB PPT)
- Introduction to Web Services Technology (~1MB PPT)
- Demonstration of VO Tools and Techonology (6MB PPT)
- VO Standards - Catalog Access (~1MB PPT)
- AVO Science Demo (~1MB PPT)
- VO Standards and Protocols( ~1MB PPT)
- SIA and SSA DAL Interfaces (~1MB PPT)
- VO Client Implementations (~1MB PPT)
- Publishing and Resource Discovery with Registries
- Astronomy Applications and Teragrid (2MB PPT)
Applications of VO
- Find observations of spectral line observations (images) in nearby galaxies
- Rediscover HR diagram
- Replicate brown dwarf candidate search using OpenSkyQuery and perform analysis using Mirage
- Looking for colour segregation in Abell Clusters
- Find HST observations of ULIRGs and for those that have HST data, find which ones have Chandra data
- Find stars in OGLE or MACHO that have been imaged by HST
- Rediscover the expansion of the universe
- Select X-ray point sources in the LMC and find associated optical information particularly light curves
- Make scatter plot or 3D plot from catalog
- Find all K giants brighter than some magnitude (Shaya)
- Make finding charts for a list of N objects of interest
- Determine the direction of the solar motion
- Compute distance to the Hyades by analysis of proper motions
- Make a scrapbook from a set of positions
- Student Project Ideas
- Results
Software
The software available for download includes AXIS (Java web services), ANT (Java-based software build tool), and several VO applications (Mirage, Topcat, VOPlot), and sample data files. WebServices and Web Applications are fairly language neutral for the client. We have decided to do our examples in Java as this is freely available and works on most platforms.
Who
List of Faculty
- Tamas Budavari, Johns Hopkins University
- Dave De Young, NOAO
- Matthew Graham, Caltech
- Gretchen Greene, Space Telescope Science Institute
- Bob Hanisch, Space Telescope Science Institute
- Tom McGlynn, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
- Maria Nieto-Santisteban, Johns Hopkins University
- William O'Mullane, Johns Hopkins University
- Ray Plante, NCSA
- Doug Tody, National Radio Astronomy Observatory
- Roy Williams, Caltech
List of Participants
- Joshua Bloom, Harvard
- Heidi Brandenburg, Caltech
- Peter Carr, Boston University
- Joe Chavez, Caltech
- Duilia De Mello, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
- Ciro Donalek, Università di Napoli Federico II, Italy
- Raul Gutierrez, LAEFF, Spain
- James Harvin, University of Delaware
- Kam Ho Tin, Lucent Technologies
- Tabetha Hole, University of Wisconsin
- Brian Kent, Cornell University
- Karl, Krughoff, University of Pittsburgh
- Peter Kukol, Microsoft
- Shui Hung Kwok, Keck Observatory
- Ray Lucas, Space Telescope Science Institute
- Ernest Mamikonyan, Drexel University
- Karen Masters, Cornell University
- Christopher Miller, Carnegie Mellon University
- Dave Mills, National Optical Astronomy Observatory
- Aleks Morgado, UPV-EHU, Spain
- Nandkumar Radha, NCSA
- Todd Pehle, Northrup-Grumman
- Ninan Sajeeth Philip, IUCAA, India
- David Rohde, University of Queensland, Australia
- Reiner Rohlfs, Integral Science Data Centre, Switzerland
- Laurie Shaw, University of Cambridge, UK
- Megan Sosey, Space Telescope Science Institute
- Kristine Spekkens, Cornell University
- Greg Stinson, University of Washington
- Alastair Stirling, Jodrell Bank Observatory
- Chris Stoughton, Fermilab
- Mark SubbaRao, University of Chicago
- Raymond Tam, Caltech/IPAC
- Takayuki Tamura, ISAS/JAXA, Japan
- Peter Teuben, University of Maryland
- Jeffrey Van Duyne, Yale University
- Vidhya Vaitheeswaran, University of Arizona
- Nico Vermaas, Westerbork Radio Observatory, Netherlands
- Przemyslaw Wozniak, Los Alamos National Laboratory
Program Organizing Committee
- Robert Hanisch (STScI) and Roy Williams (Caltech), co-chairs
- David De Young (NOAO and Aspen Center for Physics)
- Reagan Moore (SDSC)
- Ewa Deelman (USC/ISI)
- Ray Plante (NCSA)
- Guiseppina Fabbiano (SAO/CXC)
Group Photo
(click for larger version with names)
References
VO Standards
- Conesearch
- Simple Image Access Protocol
- Simple Spectrum Access Protocol (draft in preparation)
- Resource Metadata
- VOResource v0.10
- VOTable 1.1
- VOTable Software - Links to parsers and documentation
Background Reading
The following documents provide general background information about the National Virtual Observatory and its relationship to the International Virtual Observatory Alliance.
- The original NVO proposal to the NSF Information Technology Research Program
- Towards the National Virtual Observatory: A Report Prepared by the National Virtual Observatory Science Definition Team
- Virtual Observatory Architecture Overview
- The Management, Storage, and Utilization of Astronomical Data in the 21st Century
- The International Virtual Observatory
- Overview of the VO Registries
Additional VO-related documentation is available in the NVO document collection ( http://www.us-vo.org/pubs/index.cfm ) and the IVOA document collection ( http://www.ivoa.net/Documents/ ).