ADASS XII Conference

Web services/publications/outreach

P2.1 ADS Web Services for the Discovery and Linking of Bibliographic Records

Alberto Accomazzi, Guenther Eichhorn, Carolyn S. Grant, Michael J. Kurtz, Stephen S. Murray (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics)

The NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS) currently provides free access to over 2.5 million records in four bibliographic databases through a sophisticated search interface. In addition to the basic metadata about a published paper, the ADS provides links to any relevant on-line resources, including full-text articles and published data tables. Similarly, an increasingly larger number of publishers and institutions are using the ADS to verify the existence and availability of references published in the scientific literature. To facilitate the exchange of metadata necessary to establish these links, the ADS is developing prototype Web Services based on emerging industry standards such as SOAP and WSDL as part of a collaboration with the major NASA Astrophysics Data Centers. Some examples illustrating the use of this technology in resource discovery, sharing and validation are presented and discussed. The ADS is funded by NASA Grant NCC5-189.

P2.2 Web Services in AIPS++

B. Waters, J. Benson, T. Cornwell

The richness and transparency of the Glish distributed-computing model has traditionally obviated the need for standard networking components, such as the network classes found in Java, Python, or Perl. However, Glish is able to "wrap" arbitrary commands, enabling us to link powerful Java-based toolkits to Glish's event-based, client-server processing model. We have used this technique to implement a SOAP-based Cone Search web service for the Virtual Observatory.

P2.3 Turning Besançon Observatory On-line Facilities into the VO - Galactic Model Simulation, Binary Star, Molecular Collisional and TNO Data Bases

Bernard Debray (Besançon Observatory) Marie-Lise Dubernet-Tuckey (LERMA, Paris Observatory and University of Franche-Comté) Alain Grosjean, Edouard Oblak, Jean-Marc Petit, Céline Reylé, Annie Robin (Besançon Observatory)

For several years, the Besançon Observatory has been developing scientific facilities that are, or will be in the near future, accessible on-line through the World-Wide Web, namely:

the Model of stellar population synthesis of the Galaxy which produces simulations of the stellar content in various galactic directions, suitable for observation preparations and interpretations;
the Double and Multiple Star data base for retrieval of data on all observational categories of binaries;
the Molecular Collisional data base for ro-vibrational bibliographic data and H₂O+H₂ collisional excitation rates which is to be used for the Herschel and ALMA projects;
a database of discovery and recovery observations of TNOs and an unbiased sample of well determined orbits of these objects, in the framework of the Observatory's involvement in the scheduling and real-time processing of observations for the Ultra-Wide Ecliptic component of the CFHT Legacy Survey.

We describe how we envisage turning these facilities as elements of the Virtual Observatory mesh, by using, as a first step, emerging standards such as VOTables and Unified Column Descriptors (UCD).

P2.4 Manuscript Preparation, Submission and Features of the Electronic IBVS

Andras Holl (Konkoly Observatory, Budapest, Hungary)

IBVS is a small journal in the field of variable star research, which is fully electronic now. The HTML version of the journal features object database links and reference links. The necessary markup is provided by the authors, using the macros implemented in the LaTeX style file. We are testing a web-based manuscript submission tool, which would enable authors to submit data files, draw or upload simple figures, and enter plain ASCII or LaTeX text. The text is typeset on the server. The submitted manuscript can be pre-viewed, and links tested by the authors themselves. The markup has been designed to facilitate automatic information exchange between the journal and databases.

A short description is given on the other features of the electronic IBVS.

P2.5 Web Services and their use in Starlink software

Mark Taylor, Roy Platon, Alan Chipperfield, Peter Draper, David Giaretta (Starlink)

Web Services are gaining great popularity in the Grid community, and with good reason. The Starlink project is adopting Web Services as the method of interapplication communication. This is being done natively in new Java-based applications while older applications are being wrapped to provide Web Service interfaces. We are in this way providing interoperability between the generations of software in a heterogeneous, distributed manner thereby allowing the Starlink software to be useable in a distributed environment such as the GRID.

P2.6 A Collaborative Extension to the Solar Web Tool

Romain Linsolas, Isabelle F. Scholl, Eric Legay (IAS)

The number of archives of solar observations is continuously growing and the location of their storage is more and more scattered. Consequently, the number of tools or websites existing for consulting these observation catalogs (i.e. metadata) is equally in augmentation. The interest of a single program capable of accessing distributed and heterogeneous archives is therefore obvious. The Solar Web Project, developed by the MEDOC IAS team, is clearly designed to come up to these expectations. It is a first step toward a Virtual Solar Observatory.

The architecture of the current version of Solar Web (which will be available soon at http://www.medoc-ias.u-psud.fr/archive/solar_web) is based on a 3-tier model. All clients are connected to a single server which provides them with results by querying all accessible databases. This centralized view can have a significant impact on security, performance and flexibility of policy management.

The main evolution of Solar Web consists in moving to a distributed architecture. In this purpose, two solutions are currently considered. The first solution is to create collaborative servers, where all instances of the Solar Web server are networked together, and make a collaborative work in the sense that a query sent by a client can be distributed to all servers. The second solution is built on top of peer-to-peer networks technology. It consists in redesigning the network level by using JXTA (Sun's peer-to-peer technology) infrastructure. This solution can easily provide new features such as the dynamic creation of groups of users based on their field of interest.

In this paper, we will present concepts for both solutions with their advantages and disadvantages.

P2.7 The ADASS XII Meeting Web Site

Carolyn Liou (University of Maryland/STScI) Steve Hulbert (STScI)

We present the architecture, design, and implementation details of the ADASS XII web site. The web site was implemented in Zope, a high-performance application server, web server, and content management system rolled into one. Zope includes a robust, scalable object database, web services architecture, and powerful programming capabilities. The web site was built to conform to HTML, CSS, and accessibility standards as adopted by the W3C. This dynamic web site also taps into a back-end Sybase database while requiring a minimal amount of coding. We offer this site as a prototype web site suitable for reuse in supporting future ADASS meetings.

This site was created by the Information Services Team of the Computing and Information Services Division of Space Telescope Science Institute.