From nch@roe.ac.uk Fri Aug 20 12:05:07 2004 Date: Fri, 20 Aug 2004 11:38:51 +0100 (BST) From: Nigel Hambly To: WFCAM Science Archive Team -- Eckhard Sutorius , Harvey MacGillivray , Ian Bond , Mike Read , Nigel Hambly , Bob Mann Cc: CCs for WSA weekly meeting minutes distribution -- Clive Davenhall , Andrew Lawrence , Andy Adamson , Peter Shillan , John Taylor , Jim Emerson , Martin Hill , Mike Irwin , Peredur Williams , Stephen Warren Subject: WFAU WSA weekly minutes, 20 August 2004 Minutes of WFCAM Science Archive meeting: 20th August 2004 ------------------------------------------------------------ ------------------------------------------------------------ Present: NCH, MAR, ETWS, RGM, JMS, GPS Apologies: JPE, AL, MCH, HMG, JDT, PMW DONM: 10am, Friday 27th August, plate library Actions discharged: ------------------- None this week. Actions partly discharged but continuing: ----------------------------------------- ACTION: PMW to apply a little presure to the premises team to solve the continuing problem of heat overload in C1. Some discussions with the IT Support team; temperature monitoring equipment has been installed in C1 to provide ammo for engaging with the premises people; action continues ACTION: ALL to review risk register and think of any new internal or external risks that should be documented in the risk register. Defered until top level plan is explicitly defined. PMW tabled the VISTA risk register as an example. ACTION: JPE to design and set up centralised VDFS web pages. Progressing. (there is now a link to it from our WSA Twiki). - continuing; thanks for progressing these. Actions carried forward from 13/08/04 meeting: ----------------------------------------------- ACTION: NCH to remember to action a team programmer to implement range checking in the low-level ingest codes. CONTINUES Specific points and new actions: -------------------------------- Project management: NCH noted the VEGA all-hands meeting at IoA Cambridge on Tuesday which will be attended by JMS, NCH & PMW. JMS is currently looking at project performance metrics for the purposes of VDMT/VEGA reporting. The astronomer/developer recruitment interviews are now set to take place on the 22nd September; shortlisting for the programmer/developer will take place next week. Comments and issues arising from CASU fortnightly minutes: No new minutes as of this week. Networking: Nothing this week. Hardware: NCH noted that we are awaiting Eclipse installing the new backplane-wired 16 disk JBOD to fully test out the 4-channel RAID card; unfortunately the new JBOD wouldn't fit in the old rackmount rails. Eclipse are expected on Monday to sort this out. Software: MAR reported: "Mainly refactoring basic SQL servlet and retrieval thread. Trying to make it more efficient and implement areas I've recently been looking at i.e. tracking sessions/queries, authorization, box searches and UCD/column decription lookup for writing to VOTable and HTML output." ETWS has been working on CU1-4, and in particular has completely refactored CU4. Also produced a single source documentation script that produces a complete documentation set form the source (ie. bolts together Epydoc & Doxygen results). NCH has been working on CU7, integrating the low-level C/C++ codes into Python and testing out with simulated data. In the course of this work, NCH admitted to reinventing 5 wheels and soiling 3 clean interfaces... SSA: No news (is still good news) this week; NCH again noted that there has been no feedback from UKIDSS recently... Astrogrid deployment: MCH is starting to look at registry stuff for the integration of the SSA/6dF/RAVE databases. MAR suggested that a separate login should be created for the PAL application codes so that we can keep track of connections from them. ACTION: NCH to create a new SQL Server login "palro" for the Astrogrid application codes. Miscellaneous: NCH noted that Mark Casali is giving a WFCAM talk this afternoon to celebrate delivery of WFCAM to Hawaii - all are encouraged to attend (not least for consumption of drinks and "exotic munchies"...) NCH noted that a communication from Andy Adamson (JAC) has been received via AL concerning authorisation of user access to UKIDSS data, viz: "While we've got a breathing space, I would like to clarify something with respect to UKIDSS data access for UK(/ESO) astronomers. I think the idea was that we wanted to avoid wholesale redistribution of catalogue data to (e.g.) the USA, and the mechanism by which this would be arranged was to be the registration of science archive users. I'm interested in the position of individual UKIDSS members who happen to have collaborations with groups outside the consortium, and who may want to have interesting targets followed up by collaborators (again, for example, in the USA). Is there a UKIDSS policy, hope or expectation on this ?" and NCH instigated a discussion as to WFAU's position on this issue. After some discussion, the following thoughts/suggestions/recommendations have emerged: 1/ it is in WFAU's interests to implement a system of indiviually registered user authentication for access to the WSA, because we have to do this for proprietorial WFCAM PI programmes, and Astrogrid is going down individual user registration/authentication as well. 2/ the team feel that it is not our problem to authorise users or police the system. Users who apply to register for access to the WSA must be vetted by some higher authority (eg. JAC, or ESO, or ...), and police-forcing correct usage of the system is not our responsibility. 3/ to avoid problems of a sudden rush of registrations when WFCAM data become available, it would be a very good idea to start (pre)registering people asap (eg. to avoid UKIDSS users complaining that they can't get at the data). The WSA team is therefore happy to implement a system of individual user authentication for the archive. To this end, we suggest that a (pre)registration web page where any user can APPLY to be registered (we suggest username = emailaddress is a useful standard) is set up. We can do this if that is deemed to be appropriate, but the details of the information needed to authorise and register a given user need to be specified by a higher authority; likewise the process of vetting that application would really need to be handled elsewhere. We will implement a system of individual user authentication in the archive interface, keeping a database of registered users locally for that purpose (unless somebody tells us to do something different). The above summarises our current position, which is very much open to discussion/change. Over to the "higher authority"...