VOTECH: Virtual Observatory Technology
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VOTECH was the first project implementing the concept of the Euro-VO Technology
Centre (Euro-VOTC), as part of the European Virtual Observatory (Euro-VO). The home
page of the Euro-VO is here, and the home page
of Euro-VOTC is here.
These web pages serve
as an information repository specifically for the VOTECH project, providing links
to the delivered technical reports as well as downloads of the software developed
during the project. The final conclusion of the project is summarised in
this document, the
Euro-VO Reference Architecture
General Information
The VOTECH project began in 2005 and completed in June 2009. It was funded
by the European Commission under Framework Programme 6 as a Design Study,
aimed at completing the technical preparation needed for the construction of the
Euro-VO. The original proposal, all the annual
reports of the project, and a list of project
deliverables can be found in the
Reports section. The institutions
involved can be found in the Partners section
For any questions regarding the project itself refer to the
Contacts page, where you will also find a
complete list of the VOTECH Team.
Structure of Project
The VOTECH project had six workpackages, each formally designated a
"Design Study (DS)". DS1 and DS2 were actually workpackages for consortium
management and technical co-ordination. The substantive design study areas were :
- DS3 : New Infrastructure. The goals of DS3 were
to design mature infrastructure components for Euro-VO,
assess key new infrastructural technologies, and to ensure
interoperability and international integration
- DS4 : New User Tools. The goal of DS4 was to design
and prototype new VO-compliant end-user tools.
- DS5 : Intelligent Resource Discovery. The goals of DS5 were
to assess technologies relevant to astronomical resource
discovery, design new infrastructural components using these
technologies, and produce trial implementations of these new
components
- DS6 : Data Exploration. The goals of DS6
included assessment of data mining and visualization
algorithms and packages, determining how to enable them as
distributed services, making them VO compliant, and
assessing how they can be extended to run on extremely large
astronomical datasets.
VOTECH was a distributed project (see the
Partners Section. We worked in six month "Stages" where each partner
had fairly well defined goals. Every six months the entire project,
developers, scientists, and management, met for a whole week
at a different member institution.
These meetings included software demonstrations, progress reports,
future planning and goals, and one or more days of hands on collaboration
known as the "hack-a-thon". These twice-yearly meetings
continue as the "Euro-VO Technical Forum".
Technical Reports
The project delivered a series of technical reports, summarising the work
undertaken by each Design Study team, and also making technical recommendations.
As well as reports specific to each Design Study, the final product of the project
was the
Euro-VO Reference Architecture : this is an overall summary of the
conceptual and technical structure of the Euro-VO, together with a set of
recommendations for its technical implementation. All of these reports,
together with a list of other publications produced by the VOTECH team,
are provided in the
Reports Section.
Software
The VOTECH project delivered a sequence of software prototypes,
including both user tools and infrastructure software components, which we make
available here. Note however that most of the software is still
in active development so the
installation binaries and executables provided through this
website are static snapshots that were taken at the close of the
project. There is no easy way to provide a complete
software repository due to the distributed nature of the
development organisations and since development of some software is still
ongoing. In order to obtain source code or the latest
version of any software developed during the VOTECH project you will
need to contact the developers directly. To see the list
of software downloads available and the links to their
developers click here.
Project Wiki
Due to the distributed nature of the project and the partners
involved a wiki was setup to facilitate both documentation and
communications. This wiki contains the full breadth of
information about the VOTECH project and includes technical documents,
organizational documents, past meeting details and times, and a
large of amount of other information generated and collected over
the course of the project. The wiki was frozen at the
completion of VOTECH so as to preserve the information in a useable
state for future Euro-VO projects to utilize. The wiki can be
visited by clicking here.
VOTECH website is hosted at the Institute for
Astronomy, University of Edinburgh - last updated:
09-Nov-2009
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