Report IAUSymp 241: Stellar Populations

[Miguel Cerviño]

Hello all,

There as been a meeting about Stellar populations (IAUSymp 241) where  
some issues related
to the VO (theory and applications) has been discussed.
The meeting was focus in science, and there was only few people was  
involve in VO activities, so it was a "preliminary contact" between  
VO and "real world"

I send here a very draft about my impressions about this meeting that  
can be discussed in the list (there was other people in the metting,  
like Santi Cassisi, Herve Wozniak, Philippe Prugniel, Licai Deng  
(VOChina) and some people from VOIndia) that may be have a different  
impressions.

1) In general there was a strong interest of model developers to  
provide their results
in the VO

2) They do not have any "guide" to do that. I had the feeling that,  
in general,
they do not know how VO works, in particular the issues related with  
registry and
about the role of national VO host and how to coordinate their  
activities. My impression
is that they understand the VO as "another paper", in the sense that,  
systematically, when I
asked if they had asked to their "national VO contact" for support,  
they didn't contact!

Maybe more publicity about that is needed. A very simple guide that  
can be posted in astro-ph...

3) There was some confusion about issues related about the use of the  
codes in the VO.
Some of them was thinking about "open source" codes (that is not  
necessarily the case)
instead to make public their results.

4) In general, most of code developers was STRONGLY worried about how  
to keep the credits
of their work. I think that it can be done in the PROVENANCE fileds  
of the tables, but, in any case, most of the applications does not  
hand provenance fields in a particular way (and sometimes, these  
fields are erased by the application when the final VOTable is  
saved)....
I think that it will be the main issue to solve if we want convince  
"standard" astronomers to
include their result in the VO (independently if the implementation  
is done by themselves following a guide or by third parties).

5) In the particular case of synthesis models results (and some case  
for atmosphere libraries and stellar tracks/isochrones) it would be  
interesting to make a "mail-list" where non-VO people
would define what these object are and how it can be described in a  
unique way (i.e. produce a data model from the model developers but  
explained and described in a science context without VO words ;)

6) (Also a personal opinion) There is no way to access VOTables  
referenced inside VOTables
(or at least, I know no application able do that). It will be useful  
since, synthesis models, or galaxy fitting models make use of  
"collections" of other theoretical/observational data
(atmospheres libraries and isochrones in the first case or  
collections of synthesis models results in the second).

Well, It is all, I any one have more ideas/suggestions/comments about  
this will be great :)

Merry Xtmas

Miguel