The VizieR database of Astronomical Catalogues

VizieR is a database grouping in an homogeneous way thousands of astronomical catalogues gathered since decades by the Centre de Donnees de Strasbourg (CDS) and participating institutes. The history and current status of this large collection is briefly presented, and the way these catalogues are being standardized to fit in the VizieR system is described. The architecture of the database is then presented, with emphasis on the management of links and of accesses to very large catalogues. Several query interfaces are currently available, making use of the ASU protocol, for browsing purposes or for use by other data processing systems such as visualisation tools.Comment: 10 pages, 2 Postscript figures; to be published in A&A

Access Interfaces for Open Archival Information Systems based on the OAI-PMH and the OpenURL Framework for Context-Sensitive Services

In recent years, a variety of digital repository and archival systems have been developed and adopted. All of these systems aim at hosting a variety of compound digital assets and at providing tools for storing, managing and accessing those assets. This paper will focus on the definition of common and standardized access interfaces that could be deployed across such diverse digital respository and archival systems. The proposed interfaces are based on the two formal specifications that have recently emerged from the Digital Library community: The Open Archive Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) and the NISO OpenURL Framework for Context-Sensitive Services (OpenURL Standard). As will be described, the former allows for the retrieval of batches of XML-based representations of digital assets, while the latter facilitates the retrieval of disseminations of a specific digital asset or of one or more of its constituents. The core properties of the proposed interfaces are explained in terms of the Reference Model for an Open Archival Information System (OAIS).Comment: Accepted paper for PV 2005 "Ensuring Long-term Preservation and Adding Value to Scientific and Technical data" (http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/events/pv-2005/

SWE bridge: software interface for plug & work instrument integration into marine observation platforms

The integration of sensor systems into marine observation platforms such as gliders, cabled observatories and smart buoys requires a great deal of effort due to the diversity of architectures present in the marine acquisition systems. In the past years important steps have been taken in order to improve both standardization and interoperability, i.e. the Open Geospatial Consortium’s Sensor Web Enablement. This set of standards and protocols provide a well -defined framework to achieve standardized data chains. However a significant gap is still present in the lower -end of the data chain, between the sensor systems and the acquisition platforms. In this work a standard s -based architecture to bridge this gap is proposed in order to achieve plug & work, standardized and interoperable acquisition systems.Award-winningPostprint (published version

Italian center for Astronomical Archives publishing solution: modular and distributed

The Italian center for Astronomical Archives tries to provide astronomical data resources as interoperable services based on IVOA standards. Its VO expertise and knowledge comes from active participation within IVOA and VO at European and international level, with a double-fold goal: learn from the collaboration and provide inputs to the community. The first solution to build an easy to configure and maintain resource publisher conformant to VO standards proved to be too optimistic. For this reason it has been necessary to re-think the architecture with a modular system built around the messaging concept, where each modular component speaks to the other interested parties through a system of broker-managed queues. The first implemented protocol, the Simple Cone Search, shows the messaging task architecture connecting the parametric HTTP interface to the database backend access module, the logging module, and allows multiple cone search resources to be managed together through a configuration manager module. Even if relatively young, it already proved the flexibility required by the overall system when the database backend changed from MySQL to PostgreSQL+PgSphere. Another implementation test has been made to leverage task distribution over multiple servers to serve simultaneously: FITS cubes direct linking, cubes cutout and cubes positional merging. Currently the implementation of the SIA-2.0 standard protocol is ongoing while for TAP we will be adapting the TAPlib library. Alongside these tools a first administration tool (TASMAN) has been developed to ease the build up and maintenance of TAP_SCHEMA-ta including also ObsCore maintenance capability. Future work will be devoted at widening the range of VO protocols covered by the set of available modules, improve the configuration management and develop specific purpose modules common to all the service components.Comment: SPIE Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation 2018, Software and Cyberinfrastructure for Astronomy V, pre-publishing draft proceeding (reduced abstract