From: <Tara.Murphy_at_email.protected>
Date: Fri, 21 Jan 2005 11:01:46 +1100

Hi,
This discussion about proposal systems for radio astronomy (on radiovo)
might be of interested to some Aus-VO people.

Tara

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-radiovo_at_eso.org [mailto:owner-radiovo_at_eso.org] On Behalf Of
Anita Richards
Sent: Thursday, 20 January 2005 9:26 PM
To: radiovo_at_ivoa.net
Subject: Proposals

(also sent to interop so apologies to anyone who gets this twice)

If we are looking at use-case driven priorities for standards, then
something else which has come up in RadioNet is Proposal Tools.

Reps from European radio observatories and ALMA have had discussions
about designing as homogenous as possible an interface for users making
web-based observing proposals. I know that something similar is going
on with US radio (at least) observatories, and as the common link is
ALMA there is some hope of overall coherence....

We did identify the need to establish a common model (not for small
details, just to simplify terminology etc.). The drivers for this are
a) Allow software to be shared (as proposal tools use exposure
calculators
etc.)
b) Reduce the learning curve for users
c) Make it easier to make multi-telescope proposals

There is also the wish to use VO facilities to search for calibration
sources etc. and invesigate what is known already about the region of
interest. More widely, the concept includes all kinds of proposals
including for supercomputing facilities and potentially for very
demanding VO projects!

At present we don't envisage proposal tools integrated into VO
interfaces nor that a search for X would produce a response 'no data yet
but you could propose an observation with IRAM, deadline 99th of
Thermidor' (although projects like ESTAR are moving in this direction),
but to employ a VO approach to standards and to link to VO facilities
(e.g. cone search).

I am probably not going to Kyoto and I don't know if it is worth a
special session, but if anyone else is interested we can set up a forum.

cheers
a

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Dr.
Anita M. S. Richards, AstroGrid Astronomer MERLIN/VLBI National
Facility, University of Manchester, Jodrell Bank Observatory,
Macclesfield, Cheshire SK11 9DL, U.K. tel +44 (0)1477 572683 (direct);
571321 (switchboard); 571618 (fax).
Received on 2005-01-21 11:02:20