EuroVO-DCA WP6: Support to data centres from other European Countries Enrique Solano, LAEFF / SVO

WP6:Participants Lead contractor: INTA. 8/18 man-months devoted to support the WP6-related activities.

WP6: overall aims  Increased awareness about the VOs framework in the whole European Data Centre community.  Inclusion of European data centres from other countries in the VO framework.

WP6: milestones # Cycle-1 Initial list of data centres. (Month2  end Oct06). Report to PCT on new Data Centres in other countries. (Month7  ). Mid-term report. (Month 14 / ). # Cycle-2 Report to PCT on new Data Centres in other countries. (Month19  ). Final report. (Month 26  (20/10/2008)  Deliverable 14.

WP6 in three steps Advertise Identify Support

WP6: advertise Presence (through posters, talks, special sessions,…) of the DCA/WP6 in meetings with a high participation of people from potential candidate centres (IAU GA, JENAM, National Astronomical Societies, ADASS,…).

WP6: identify Identification of data centres interested in joining the VO initiative in Europe.  From centres: Contact point. Letter of interest to the WP6 leader indicating their objectives, specific needs and added value to the DCA projects and the VObs in general.  From WP6: Study and approval of the proposals. Give priorities (if needed). Letter of agreement stating the terms (activities to support, duration,…) of the collaboration.

WP6: support Support to the take-up and implementation. Documentation: Doc. on user and technical requirements. Guide: “How to become a VO-compliant data centre. Step by step”. In collab. with WP3. Visits: To/from the data centres. Follow-up plans: after the visit. Participation in workshops (DCA & IVOA). Feedback from data centres (at the end of the collaboration).

Initial list of Data Centres Konkoly Obs. / Budapest, Hungary  Andreas Holl’s to F. Genova in Nov05. OK Contact point OK OK Letter of interest OK Data - Catalogues: (stellar variability, sunspots) - Images (plate collections, CCDs, robotic telescopes) - Theory: stellar pulsation models Services - Time series analysis Publications: IBVS (Vo-compliant!), CoKon

Initial list of Data Centres Astronomical Inst. / Czech Rep. OK (Petr Skoda) Contact point OK (Petr Skoda) NO Letter of interest NO

Initial list of Data Centres Inst. fur Astronomie/Wien (Austria) NO Contact point NO NO Letter of interest NO Data● Services - WEBDA- VALD: atomic data database.

Who else? Dpt. of Astronomy. Univ. of Athens., Greece

Who else? Russia & Armenia. Activities conducted through their respectives VOs.

Who else? Bulgary wide-field (>1°) photographic observations from 345 archives. Only descriptive information of the plates. An object catalogue does not exist.

What about the very first steps?: Digitization  Valuable plate archives in Eastern countries are waiting for their digitization due to the lack of funds.  eContentplus Objective: “to make digital content in Europe more accesible, usable and exploitable, facilitating the creation and diffusion of information, in areas of public intesrest, at Community level” Scientific contents is one of the four target areas Not easy: Only 19 proposals out 238 (Call 2005) BUT Digitisation or creation of contents is not funded (primarily a responsibility of the Member States).

Who else?

To the rest of WP6 participants  How to organize the collaboration in WP6? No face-to-face meeting are required. & distribution lists (who? 1 per partner (INTA, CNRS, ESA, ESO, LU) + MD+FG.?)  What are your aims, lines of work,…, to develop in WP6?  By Oct 9th.  Ideas, suggestions, etc, etc, are welcome.  By Oct 9th.

Prior to VO Example of what is “Towards an accessible science: facilitating access to scientific digital resources for visually impaired students” Building of digital libraries

Initial list of Data Centres Digitization of the Moscow Astronomical Plate Archive A project aimed at digitizing the Moscow astronomical plate archive has been launched at the Sternberg Astronomical Institute and the Institute of Astronomy (Russian Academy of Sciences). The collection contains up to plates taken with different instruments in Moscow, Crimea, and at other sites and kept in Moscow and in Zvenigorod near Moscow. The most important part of the archive are high-quality sky photographs taken in 1948 – 1996 with the 40-cm (F = 160 cm) astrograph in Simeiz (Crimea), Kuchino (near Moscow), and Nauchny (Crimea); the same instrument was used at the Sonneberg Observatory before the World War II. The project makes use of two CREO Ever Smart Supreme flatbed scanners at the Sternberg Institute and two Epson Expression 1640 XL flatbed scanners at the Zvenigorod Observatory of the Institute of Astronomy. We will discuss the current state of the project, the future availability of the scanned plates for the community, and the first scientific results using the scans. The Golosiiv Online Plate Archive Database. Management and Maintenance The preliminary online version of the database of the MAO NASU plate archive is constructed by means of MySQL+PHP and provides a high flexibility in constructing SQL-queries for data search optimization, protected access to administrative interface and wide range of search parameters as well as tools for the binding of different types of observational data archives, because of structures of observational databases of different classes can differ in a hight degree in amount of stored parameters and in their physical nature. The final version of database is currently constructing under the demands and in accordance with principles of international data archives and has to be strongly generalized in order to provide a possibility of data mining by means of standard interfaces. The complete version has to be based on the quite different structure of tables in order to optimize the access time and selected data content and to be the best fitted to the demands of WFPDB Group for databases of the plate catalogues. The high degree of data reliability is practically the most important part of database creation procedure which can be achieved by step-by-step verification. Principles of the verification differ for different classes of data and are developed depending mostly on theirs physical nature. The final version of online database is supplying with preview scans of plates obtained with MicroTek ScanMaker 9800 XL TMA. The scanning procedure is not total but is conducted selectively in the frames of special projects. We await of final version of database till the end of the year.

Initial list of Data Centres The Belgrade Plate Archive Database : current status and scientific tasks The plate archives of the Belgrade Astronomical Observatory contain more than glass photographic plates from the period 1936 – 1996.In addition to the other equipment the Observatory disposed of four instruments devoted especially to astrophotographic observations: Zeiss Refractor 65/1055 cm with special camera, Zeiss Astrograph 16/80 cm, Zeiss Refractor 20/302 cm with two photographic cameras 16/80 cm and Askania Equatorial refractor 13.5/100 cm. Scientific observations were performed in the framework of the programs like : minor planet follow-up, search for the new objects (33 new minor planets were discovered from BAO), comet investigation, systematic observations of the Sun, Moon, giant planets, natural and artifical satellites, variable stars, double and multiple stars, stellar clusters, etc. Rare phenomena, such as passages of Mercury and Venus across the solar disc, lunar occultations of stars and planets and special objects have been observed, too. The current status of Belgrade Astrophtopgraphic Plate Archive (BAPA) Database is reported and a brief description of all phases of such a large Project is given. The preliminary computer-readable Catalogue of relevant data from the period is finished as a representative sample only. The Catalogue BAPA is included into WFPDB ( http: // as one of the basic sources. A couple of statistical distributions as an example of the kind of informations which will be possible to extract from the Database is given. Russian Astronomical Data Resources The ultimate goal of the RVO initiative is to integrate resources of astronomical data accumulated in Russian observatories and institutions, and to provide Russian data to the rest of the world. We collect information about all available Russian and some former Soviet Union (fSU) astronomical data resources, classify them and register them in the registries of other VO projects. A new version of the list of Russian and fSU astronomical resources is recently compiled and presented here. The original resources that contain astronomical data obtained by Russian and fSU astronomers are listed by kind of object they treat (Sun, Solar System, Stars, Stellar Systems, Radioastronomy, Cosmic Rays, Mixed Data Archives). This list of resources (as well as other information on RVO) can be found on the RVO web page.