IVOA theory sessions in Kyoto

[Gerard Lemson]

Dear colleagues

I would like to know about the plans of any of you to go to the next IVOA
meeting in Kyoto and your interest in partaking in one or more sessions of
the theory interest group. In particular I would like to know whether you
have anything you might like to contribute there, be it a demo or a
presentation.
Also, do you have any ideas about specific subjects that you would like to
see
discussed?

I think that we should at least have one session there, hopefully two.
And as a first proposal I would like to suggest the subjects in the list
below to be discussed. The goal should be the construction of some demos
that are designed and implemented according to the IVOA philosophy, such
as the use of common standards, the registration of datasets and services,
solutions promoting interoperability between different sites, promoting
the interaction of observers and theorists.

I know that some of you have started projects on theory VO issues and I
think it would be useful for us to see some of the results already before
the meeting. GAVO has made some theory services available on its website
(http://www.g-vo.org, in particular http://www.g-vo.org/planck and
http://www.g-vo.org/mpasims) and is creating more that will be published
there soon, at least in a preliminary fashion. Please submit any links
to result to the TVO wiki page or send them to the mailing list.

The list of subjects I propose we discuss is:
1. Availability of simulations online.
One of the goals of the theory group is to promote the publication of
simulation results according to standards developed in the IVOA working
groups. A prerequisite for this is that simulation results are actually
available online in some form. We need to have examples of this and look at
different ways in which simulations results are currently made available
online, which kinds of simulations are there, what services are provided
for accessing them. From this we can select a first category for which
we can look at ...

2. IVOA compatible publication of simulations.
We should choose a small set of existing examples which we want to further
develop and propose as use cases for the standards process. The further
development
should consist of work along the lines of the IVOA working groups. In
particular:
we want it to be possible to register data sets and services in an IVOA
registry,
we want to be able to describe simulations according to IVOA standard data
models,
we want to come up with standards for data exchange formats (VOTable?, UCD),
we
may want to see where the VO query language could be implemented and maybe
there
are some standard data access services we can define. Some proposals have
been
made, for example Laurie Shaw’s contributions on a simulation data model and
a
list of UCDs for simulation data. It would be good if these and other
proposals
can be discussed in the forum already before the actual meeting in Kyoto, so
that we may come up with some proposals we can make to the other working
groups.

3. Theory/observational interface.
As has often been stated before, the holy grail of the theory work in the
IVOA
is to promote and facilitate the interaction between observers and theorists
by
defining and implementing services that make it easy for observers to
evaluate
and use the results of simulations. The standard example that is
consistently
mentioned is the "virtual telescope". A software component that can
"observe"
a simulation and produce mock images that can be directly compared to real
observations. GAVO is collaborating with a number of groups who have created
such tools which GAVO is publishing on its webpage. The planck simulator is
one, others are observations of hydro simulations of galaxy clusters and
mock
pencil beams through a large scale cosmological simulation. Based on the
various examples, it seems to me that this virtual telescope concept offers
a nice opportunity to come up with a modularized design specification that
allows explicit interoperability between components designed and implemented
by experts on their field. I am writing up a proposal on this that I will
submit to the mailing list in the coming week (I hope).

Please send your comments, criticisms, additions to this proposal to this
theory mailing list. Especially send links to examples and other
contributions
to start some discussion on these items, in particular about the
requirements
on the IVOA working groups.

Cheers

Gerard Lemson






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