From nch@roe.ac.uk Fri Apr 8 12:53:32 2005 Date: Fri, 8 Apr 2005 11:55:41 +0100 (BST) From: Nigel Hambly To: WFCAM Science Archive Team -- Eckhard Sutorius , Mike Read , Nigel Hambly , Nicholas Cross , Bob Mann Cc: CCs for WSA weekly meeting minutes distribution -- Andrew Lawrence , Andy Adamson , John Taylor , Jim Emerson , Malcolm Stewart , Martin Hill , Mike Irwin , Peredur Williams , Stephen Warren Subject: WFAU WSA weekly meeting minutes, 8 April 2005 Minutes of WFCAM Science Archive meeting: 8th April 2005 ------------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------------------- Present: NCH, PMW, MAR, NJC, ETWS Apologies: MCH, JPE, AL, JMS, RGM DONM: 10am, Friday 15th April 2005, plate library Actions discharged: ------------------- ACTION: MAR to check into the CVS the website docs, and all to update the online documentation as necessary over the next week. Discharged ACTION: JDT to look into the Astrogrid community username policy (if there is such a thing). Discharged; the emerging (as opposed to officially sanctioned) policy is to assign names/communities like JoeBloggs@community.ac.uk, so our ad hoc usage of email addresses for usernames will need changing when we implement the AG software (i.e. to avoid confusing, unparsable strings like JoeBloggs@roe.ac.uk@community.ac.uk) Actions partly discharged but continuing: ----------------------------------------- ACTION: MAR & NCH to check out SQL Server networked server functionality for cross-server querying. Continues; NCH suggested we should do some experiments with the linked SQL Servers ahmose & amenhotep once the dust has settled on their reorganisation over the next couple of weeks. Continues: RGM noted that JHU have been doing some experiments with individual DBs distributed across several instances of SQL Server. Still continues: NCH will be testing this out by doing some cross-neighbour associations between two SQL Servers. - all continuing; thanks for progressing these. Actions carried forward from 30/03/05 meeting: ---------------------------------------------- None this week. Specific points and new actions: -------------------------------- Project management: JMS has distributed a new version of the VDFS top-level plan. NCH suggested that this could be put on the VDFS web site to supersede the extremely out-of-date GANTTs on our own archive development web pages. ACTION: PMW to send comments to JMS and ask that the final version is put on the VDFS web site. PMW noted that confirmation of the funded positions from the last grant review has been received from PPARC and this should be sufficient to begin recruitment of the two new posts (WSA operator and datamining support scientist). NCH and PMW noted the next VDMT monthly telecon on Wed April 13 at 2:30pm. The usual reporting table was completed during this meeting, and PMW will type up with the usual narrative. Since this is the end-of-quarter meeting, the forward plan for Q2 will need to be created and presented at the following one. This plan will need to included effort for recruitment of the unfilled and new posts. ACTION: NCH, PMW & RGM to meet sometime next week to draft the particulars for the new WFAU posts. WFCAM update: No new update as of 1st April. Comments and issues arising from CASU fortnightly minutes: No new minutes as of this week. Networking: All useful phase-I commissioning data is currently being pipeline processed and transfered from CASU to WFAU. Transfer is working fine (>10 Mbyte/s sustained rates). Ingestion process is being iterated again to cope with the changes in this incarnation of the data. Hardware: Online archive hardware continues to function normally. New file server sneferu is set up, with NFS exports to web server thoth (read only) and curation server djoser (read/write). NCH noted the RAID monitoring situation on this server. ACTION: ETWS to look into 3dm RAID monitoring on sneferu, along the lines of the browsable pages on djoser. Software: NCH has been refactoring CU16 (catalogue joining) in lieu of effort from the previously noted recruitment process. ETWS is (re)iterating the ingestion codes, now based on the real pipeline processed commissioning data. NJC continues to work on the global photometric calibration process; MAR has been looking into improving the on-line web documentation for the WSA. Data Release: NCH noted that it appears that there is very little support in client-end imaging applications for Rice tile compression. After some discussion about options for user-friendly solutions, it has been decided to give users the option to download uncompressed images from the archive, as well as Rice compressed images. A link will be provided to locations of software that users can install to decompress Rice compressed images; in the longer term, the assumption is that imaging applications will be enhanced to cope with this extremely important and useful format. NCH and MAR noted that communications with Peter Draper (support developer for the ubiquitous Starlink imaging application GAIA/SkyCAT) did not result in any definitive statement about enhancing that particular tool to read Rice compressed FITS images... Of less importance (possibly) is correct support for WCS ZPN projections in imaging applications. A number of people have noted this problem; it appears that the latest version of DS9 copes correctly, but again GAIA does not... NCH noted that Steve Warren is assembling an extended UKIDSS Testers list for inclusion in the existing testers community; with the proviso that these people recognise the limitations of the Phase-I data and don't bombard CASU/WFAU with emails concerning problems we all know about, then we are happy that the tester community is extended to a few tens of people. SSA: NCH noted that at last week's UKIDSS science verification meeting, a few people had asked about querying cross-matched data in the archive, and it is clear that users are confused about how to do this. A tutorial needs to be written that explains this in more explicit detail, as users are finding it hard to understand from the Cookbook examples alone. ACTION: NCH to write a tutorial on how to query cross-matched data in the WSA for the web pages. Astrogrid deployment: No news this week. Miscellaneous: NCH noted that ADASS 2005 has been announced for 2-5 Oct in Madrid. Since this is being hosted by ESAC, and the latter is taking over development of the database access system for GAIA (that's the astrometry mission, not the imaging application) then it is probably a good idea for NCH to go. NJC suggested he might like to attend also to give a paper on his archive development work.