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Activities of the NVO Metadata Working Group

Contents

Discussion and Meeting Minutes
Working Documents
Software
Demonstrations & Toys

See MWG discussion archive for a record of all discussion and telecon minutes.

Latest Telecon Agenda

Latest Telecon Minutes

• Registries
  • Requirements for a NVO Registries
  • Use Cases:
    • 3 use cases from Niall Gaffney.
    • Catagorized Use Cases from Ray Plante.
    • 3 use cases from Tom McGlynn.
    • Consider the case of a resource having many collections to register: see Tom's discussion of the Vizier case
  • OAI for VO Registries (Draft): a report on how the OAI harvesting protocol might address VO registry requirements.

  Note that an IVOA Registry WG is underway. Broader discussion can be found at the IVOA Registry Wiki Site.

• Identifiers
  • Requirements for a NVO Identifiers.
  • MWG Telecon minutes, 2003-02-06 in which consensus was reached on some major issues regarding identifiers.

• NVO Resource Questionaire: results from the informal survey conducted at the Spring 2002 Team meeting

• Metadata Frameworks
  • A Scalable Metadata Framework for the Virtual Observatory     DRAFT
    Gzipped PostScript (173 kB), PDF (172 kB),

• Resource Description
  • Descriptions of Cone-search Resources: a study
  • Catalog Profile Proposal (Tom McGlynn)
  • SDSS General Resource Profile Draft Definition (Plante & Shaya)
    a similar effort from the ISAIA project

• Space-time Metadata (Arnold Rots)
  • Space-Time Coordinate Specification

• Science Scenario Development
  • "100" Scientific Questions for the NVO (a working document)
  • Question Analysis Notes
  • Collected metadata concepts
  • Strawman Proposals for Building Metadata Infrastructure
  • Cone Search Specification

JAVOT: a Java VOTable Parser

This parser, contributed by Roy Williams (roy@cacr.caltech.edu) is based on automatically generated Java classes (via Breeze XML Binder) that have an interface that directly reflects XML elements. The result is a VOTable-specific interface (as opposed to a generic interface provided by DOM). More details are provided on the JAVOT page.

VOTABLE Perl Modules from the ClassX project   v 0.02   updated 2002 May 21

This set of Perl modules maps elements of a VOTable into specialized Perl objects built on top of XML::DOM. It is useful both for parsing existing VOTable documents and creating new ones from scratch. It requires XML::DOM. Comments and bug reports can go to the author, Eric Winter (elwinter@lheapop.gsfc.nasa.gov)

VOTable::DOM   Beta   updated 2002 Apr 8 11:30 CDT

a Perl module for formatting and printing a VOTable. This is only BETA software (not everything is implemented and tested), and it's possible that it will never be brought to a production state. Nevertheless, hopefully it will be of use to some.

It is based on top of the DOM data model. It defines specialized classes for commonly handled nodes of a VOTable (e.g. FIELD, TABLE, etc.) that inherit from XML::DOM::Element; thus, anything you can do with XML::DOM::Element (using the DOM interface), you can do with VOTable::DOM classes. In addition, the specializations provide extra functions that make it easier to build up a complient VOTable.

There's not much documentation at the moment. Check out the annotated test script for an example of use. Brief installation instructions can be found at the top of the VOTable::DOM Module file. Some documentation also appears peppered within that file as well.

Cone Search Demo

• The specification
• Directory of registered compliant services
• A VOTable Cross-match tool