WWT & VO (was NG of GS & BO standards for JPEG with WCS)

[Alberto Conti]

> For astronomy we need to take a stand for full functionality and  
> not be bullied by the GIS community into adopting something that is  
> not suitable for good astronomy visualization, when we can have  
> better.

I think we have adopted what was available, no bulling involved.

>
> We need to provide the input to the standards committees to make  
> sure that future updates to standards incorporate astronomy's  
> unique requirements.
>
This should be the role of the VO, but I have not much happening in  
this direction till the flurry of email after the AAS. In my opinion,  
the need for much better integration with the Sky/WWT teams is a must  
if we indeed want to address the distribution and visualization of  
large collections.

-Alberto

>
> Jonathan
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Alberto Conti [mailto:aconti at stsci.edu]
> Sent: Friday, January 18, 2008 10:34 AM
> To: Doug Tody
> Cc: Jonathan Fay; Pierre Fernique; interop at ivoa.net; Brian McLean;  
> Antonio Volpicelli
> Subject: Re: WWT & VO (was NG of GS & BO standards for JPEG with WCS)
>
>>
>> One is the OpenGIS Web Map Service (WMS), which is designed for rapid
>> remote visualization of graphical data.  With the addition of some
>> astronomy oriented projections this could work well for graphical
>> data from astronomy.  Unlike SIA, WMS does not require a prior query
>> for data access, and instead allows direct access at the pixel level
>> to seamless, wide area graphical imagery.
>>
> At STScI, Antonio Volpicelli, Brian McLean and I have been
> experimenting on this for some time now.
> It turns our that GoogleSky can "hook" directly onto WMS servers. I
> assume WWT can/will be able to do that as well, but I don't know.
>
> We have built a full sky map of GALEX data that drives our in-browser
> map application (http://mastmap.stsci.edu/galex/). The same data is
> fed to GoogleSky. We had a poster at the AAS on this (047.28) Web
> Mapping Services Technology and Astronomical Data (http://
> www.abstractsonline.com/viewer/SearchResults.asp)
>
> WMS seems to be a rather nice framework, lacking only proper
> astronomical projections.
>
> Ciao,
> Alberto
>
>>
>>
>> On Thu, 17 Jan 2008, Jonathan Fay wrote:
>>
>>> As far as WWT we are planning to document all our data access
>>> interfaces, and open them up some time after we go live pending
>>> legal review.
>>> We have a cutout service, a high-speed tile service, and a
>>> reprojection/compositing service that are currently used internal
>>> to WWT that may be opened up as the interfaces stabilize and we
>>> confirm the legal status on the data to be served.
>>>
>>> The reason they exist, rather than hit the VO sources directly is
>>> they are highly tuned for large scale visualization across the
>>> sky. No current VO service is designed to service that need, so it
>>> was necessary for us to implement that service, as well as a new
>>> projection to allow full 3d sky access efficiently without
>>> singularities. The full sky tile sets are meant to be reprojected
>>> with 3d hardware, a software reprojection is necessary for
>>> integration of them into 2d imaging applications, thus our cutout
>>> and reprojection service.
>>>
>>> It may take a while for external access to get rolling on this
>>> given the new projections, but the cutout server one it is
>>> released should be useful for applications fairly quickly as in
>>> gives a TAN projection back as JPEG or PNG image, and won't
>>> require reprojection for display.
>>>
>>> Most of this data is sourced from VO sites thru the VO interfaces,
>>> but we reproject and tile as necessary to make it scale well. For
>>> instance Hubble publishes press release images thru a SIA query
>>> and VO Table. Some of which are 16k x 16k and over half a
>>> gigabyte. These images are beautiful, but too large for public
>>> download. They must be turned into tiled multi-res pyramids to be
>>> served on mass scale efficiently. Other VO services had full sky
>>> data, but the data must be projected into a tiles multi-res mosaic
>>> for visualization. That operation is not real-time friendly, but
>>> once that work has been done the result is a useful service that
>>> should (and will be) made available to others to use.
>>>
>>> Related to your other question is that WWT will also natively open
>>> AVM encoded images (currently a IVOA note) and display them
>>> directly in the sky. The last details of V1.1 of the proposed
>>> standard were hashed out at a meeting at AAS last week. Spitzer,
>>> Chandra and Hubble images are all going to be encoded with AVM,
>>> and many already are.
>>>
>>> WWT Pro, that we are co-developing with Harvard IIC/CFA will be a
>>> very rich VO client for interacting with VO images,  catalogs,
>>> footprints, events, etc. While it is entirely possible to have all
>>> this functionality in the wide release version of WWT, we don't
>>> want to overload the existing VO infrastructure.
>>>
>>> Jonathan Fay
>>> Principal Research Software Design Engineer
>>> WorldWide Telescope
>>> Microsoft Research
>>>
>>>
>>> -----Original Message-----
>>> From: owner-interop at eso.org [mailto:owner-interop at eso.org] On
>>> Behalf Of Pierre Fernique
>>> Sent: Thursday, January 17, 2008 12:17 AM
>>> To: interop at ivoa.net
>>> Subject: Re: next generation of Sky in Google Earth
>>>
>>>
>>> Dear VO members,
>>>
>>> I would like to bring the discussion to another point related to
>>> the VO
>>> and Google Sky/WWT.
>>>
>>> I would like to ask to Google sky team and Microsoft WWT team if
>>> it is
>>> possible to create my own client accessing their image data base.  
>>> For
>>> instance, if I want to add a dedicated Aladin layer displaying the
>>> HTM
>>> sky background images from Microsoft data base, or the sector base
>>> sky
>>> background images from Google, could I ? 1) Is there open
>>> standards for
>>> that and I can develop my own client ? 2) Could I have to plug a
>>> kind of
>>> proprietary libraries in Aladin ? 3) Or perhaps it is not  
>>> possible at
>>> all (technically ? strategically ? no documented ?) Obviously, the
>>> first
>>> solution will be the best for my VO point of view.
>>>
>>> I really appreciate to offer to Aladin users these astronomical  
>>> data.
>>> Exactly in a symetric way that WWT and Google Sky use Simbad opened
>>> standards (object resolver, ...), or VizieR catalog access, and
>>> other VO
>>> access..
>>>
>>> Pierre Fernique
>>>
>
> Dr Alberto Conti
> Community Missions Office
> Space Telescope Science Institute
> contact | tel: 410-338-4534 | aim: wscience
>
>
>

Dr Alberto Conti
Community Missions Office
Space Telescope Science Institute
contact | tel: 410-338-4534 | aim: wscience