Interoperability & Workflows
The activities of this transverse axis are characteristic of those of a VO data center and concern the management and supervision of services, the management of archives and backups, updating the registry data (equivalent of a VO resource catalog), service statistics, and assistance to new projects. This also includes involvement in international projects such as VO validation, authentication management, and on-demand calculation services.
The multidisciplinary nature of this theme comes from shared knowledge and common tools relating to data storage, data dissemination and on-demand calculation requirements. It is of particular interest for emerging projects or teams with no experience.
In addition to the management of existing services, highlights of this activity include:
- Validators and Validation: A monitoring system allows validation of all IVOA services and contributes to increase the reliability of the VO worldwide - a survey is presented at each IVOA meeting ("weather report"). This system has been modernized since 2017 to increase its efficiency, and daily validates over 30,000 services in a few hours. The interface is scriptable via a web API and allows data providers to monitor their services, compare their errors with those of other data centers, etc.
- Expertise on setting up data dissemination frameworks. Although those provide powerful and versatile data ingestion modules, the learning curve is often very steep for new VO services.
- Construction of an authentication model of the users through multiple identity federations. Standardization of the LDAP-like query in accordance with the recommendations of the GÉANT network. PADC is also involved in authentication management within the multidisciplinary RDA project.
- Support of "events" in local VO services — providing information about an observation or a prediction. Detection of gravitational waves since 2017 are of course a major driver, but this concept of event impacts several projects: Europlanet VESPA, CTA, FRIPON, LOFAR / NenuFAR ... Several diffusion platforms were set up and event creation and automated information retrieval tools in events are being finalized. It is also planned to provide access to past events for data mining and statistics within PADC using a VO access information protocol.
- The OPUS platform has been set up in the frame of the ASTERICS programme to launch jobs in the VO. It is now used by other projects such as CTA, MASER, ComPOSE, VESPA, and potentially other services.
These actions are regularly presented during the IVOA Interop meetings.