Observation/Characterization/DM task

[bonnarel at alinda.u-strasbg.fr]

Dear DM group members,

     The Observation/Characterization/DM task group after a first year 
of existence is
to be reorganised. (It was created last year after the Cambridge 
meeting, succeeding to the
previous characterization task group)

I 1st year production:
----------------------
     Several presentations have been made in Baltimore around this topic.
(Juan, François, Mireille and part of Fabien's presentation)
     The voluminous task group discussion has been published in 7 long 
mails during the last three weeks
     FB is currently completing the DM wiki pages related to Observation.
A short side-meeting has been held in Baltimore on Tuesday evening.

   II What is the situation so far
----------------------------------
    One of the most urgent tasks for the DM WG is to provide the IVOA  
community with a photometric datamodel
project. There is a task group dedicated to that with Jonathan, Alberto 
and Jesus....

      Beside this an observation datamodel (or generic dataset 
datamodel to speak in DAL vocabulary) is needed to
gather metadata such as a DatasetID, Curation, Target and 
Characterization (Provenance is also part of the scheme).
      Characterization has to be extended to allow discrete valued axes 
such as Polarization, and some advanced information
including response functions and PSFs ...
      Provenance has two main families of use cases:
                 - advanced data discovery = help the selection of 
relevant data by giv ing a summary of its history
                 - reprocessing. For one specific observation, provide 
metadata about its progenitors and ancillary data
(raw data, calibration, component exposures, etc ...) as well as 
pointers to these datasets in order to allow some kind of
  reprocessing ...

     So beside the Photometry task group we maintain an 
Observation/Char/Provenance Task group with the following
mandate:
       Write a draft with use cases,  concepts, UML design, xml 
schemas, examples in various serialisation format
  (including VOTABLE and JSON)
      -see DM WG roadmap by M Louys, Closing Plenary ? Baltimore , for that...

III Consequences for the Task group
----------------------------------
     We think that the general discussion on the use cases concepts and 
technical aspects can now be moved to the DM
list as was asked by Mireille during interop.
     The task group will now concentrate on writing the draft. We are 
looking for volunteers to participate.
     Regular progress and hot topics during the draft elaboration wil 
be reported on the DM list...


                                             F.Bonnarel task group coordination
                                             M.Louys DM WG chair