First release of Footprint Services

[Jim Gray]

works for me.

Region definition has line feeds and tabs in it.
Looks good when edited in MS word (not in notepad, so its UNIX like)
I hope the HTM/Spatial library ignores the control chars. 




Jim Gray
Microsoft Research,  Suite 1690, 455 Market, SF CA 94105, tel: 415 778
8222 fax: 425 706 7329 Gray at Microsoft.com
http://research.Microsoft.com/~gray


-----Original Message-----
From: Tamas Budavari [mailto:budavari at pha.jhu.edu] 
Sent: Tuesday, October 24, 2006 8:20 AM
To: interop at ivoa.net
Cc: Laszlo Dobos; Alex Szalay; Gretchen Greene; Jim Gray; Arnold Rots
Subject: First release of Footprint Services 


Hi Everyone,

We are happy to announce the first release of Footprint Services for the
Virtual Observatory. In case you missed the ADASS in Tucson last week,
below please find the abstract of the talk that introduced the new
portal at
	http://www.voservices.net/footprint/

I am delighted to see that our recently published online repository is
being used as intended and people have already started submitting the
sky coverages of various surveys. Thank you! The list now includes SDSS,
GALEX, UKIDSS, CFHTLS and more. Enjoy!

We'll keep improving the site, the web services and the content over
time and we hope you all will find it useful. Feedbacks, as usual, are
welcome!

Cheers, T.
___

(O4a.1) Footprint Services for Everyone
	Tamas Budavari (The Johns Hopkins University)
	Laszlo Dobos (Eotvos Lorand University)
	Alex Szalay (The Johns Hopkins University)
	Gretchen Greene (Space Telescope Science Institute)
	Jim Gray (Microsoft Research)
	Arnold Rots (Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics )

There is much more to astronomical observations than just source
catalogs. 
For example, when working with multiple observations at different
wavelengths, knowing their precise coverages is just as important, e.g.
to look for dropouts, and can be very difficult in case of the most
significant observations that are often the most complex, as well. This
functionality has been missing almost entirely from the toolbox of many
astronomers until today.

We present high-level user and Web services for dealing with
astronomical survey geometry of arbitrary complexity. Based on our
high-performance spherical library, we built an online public repository
of footprints preloaded with the coverage of some of the most widely
used datasets today including the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), the
Galaxy Evolution Explorer (GALEX) and the Hubble Space Telescope (HST)
exposures. We publish a Web based toolkit that enables advanced spatial
searches for regions of interest on the sky, Boolean operations on
selected footprints (union, intersection), on-the-fly visualization, and
exact area computation. We also provide an easy-to-use interactive
footprint editor, as well as a simple upload facility. The results of
the searches and region manipulations can be saved and published on the
footprint server or downloaded in various formats including ASCII and
the VO compliant Space-Time Coordinate (STC) region representation.
___

Tamas Budavari

Dept. of Physics and Astronomy       
The Johns Hopkins University         
3400 N. Charles Street 
Baltimore, MD 21218                    
Phone: +1 (410) 516-0643
Fax: +1 (410) 516-5096
http://www.sdss.jhu.edu/~budavari