[csp] Proposal for an IVOA Radio Astronomy Interest Group

[Mark Allen]

Dear Bruno, Mark, Francois and CSP,

Following my message on 31 Jan, and with your help, we received input from a number of different projects on the draft charter and motivation text for a Radio Astronomy Interest Group in IVOA. I’ve integrated the comments as best as I could, and I updated charter and motivation are below.

I think that this is ready to be proposed to the IVOA Exec, and that we should go ahead and ask for it to be an agenda item for Exec meeting on Tuesday.

cheers,
Mark


IVOA Radio Astronomy Interest Group

Charter:

The group shall define requirements for the representation of radio astronomy data in the VO through:
•  development of use cases for data discovery, access and visualization.
•  identification of metadata concepts needed by radio astronomy data that are not currently supported by the VO

The group will provide a well identified point of contact for radio projects with IVOA, and actively encourage their use of VO standards and protocols.

The group will organize sessions focused on radio astronomy data at IVOA meetings 


Motivation:

Radio astronomy has several domain-specific requirements that need to be fulfilled if radio astronomy data is to be well-served by the VO. While there has been recent work on multi-dimensional data relevant for both radio and other wavebands, there remain areas in which new concepts/standards, or extensions of existing ones are needed for radio astronomy. This includes data products from the wide variety of radio astronomy observations from single dishes to correlated visibilities from interferometers and involving (time, frequency, beam properties, polarization, Faraday rotation measures etc.)

The formation of this group is particularly timely, given the ramp-up of radio astronomy projects that will generate large volumes of both raw data and processed images. The groups and projects that have expressed interest to be involved include:

ALMA
NRAO’s Science Ready Data Products Initiative (VLA data and user-defined ALMA data products)
ASKAP and MWA (CASDA, MWA ASVO, Australian SKA Regional Centre)
The Canadian Initiative for Radio Astronomy Data Analysis (CIRADA), which will produce high level data from the VLA Sky Survey, the CHIME telescope and surveys with ASKAP.
FAST (Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope) 
SKA - SKAO
ASTRON (LOFAR, APERTIF, WSRT, …)
The ESCAPE project, also supporting connection to VO for LOFAR, JIVE, and SKA  (also brings results of ASTERICS and AENEAS projects)
MeerKAT, and the South African Inter-University Institute for Data Intensive Astronomy (IDIA)
INAF Division for Radioastronomy - Working Group for radio telescopes data archive

Many of these projects are planning their science platforms and ways users will find/access/use the data. By providing the necessary standards, the IVOA can help to ensure that VO protocols can be integrated into these efforts from an early stage, thus enabling interoperability and data discovery both within radio astronomy and between radio astronomy and other wavelengths



Mark Allen
Director CDS
+33 (0)7 84 07 87 57
mark.allen at astro.unistra.fr
http://cdsweb.u-strasbg.fr/~allen

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