Report on the First Astro-Grid Workshop

Hosted by Queen's University Belfast, 29 & 30 Jan 2001 

Purpose of meeting
------------------

The purpose of the meeting was two fold:

(i) to provide information and allow open discussion of the astrogrid 
program with members of the UK Astronomy community

(ii) start to identify the areas of existing activity with the UK in
the context of the rest of Europe and North America.


The specific scientific topics that were the aim of  the meeting were:

1. Data mining.

     The computational grid will be used for the development of innovative
     data mining methods. (Keywords: self-organization, multiple resolution,
     progressive refinement.) Closely associated with this work will be the
     development of new tools for ingest of data to data archives and data
     centres.

2. Information Discovery.

     The grid will help the astronomer face the tsunamis of data resulting
     from current and near-future observing facilities. Sub-themes: dealing
     with structured and unstructured data, search and discovery tools,
     smart information agents.

3. Visualization.

     Observed data and in addition simulated data (from cosmological models,
     and instrument and detector models) will be used. Approaches will
     include interactive visual user interfaces, 3D representations, and
     innovative new techniques aiming at support for distributed,
     collaborative work.




Attendance
----------

The workshop was attended by 37 participants including 
senior staff from the Strasbourg Data Centre, Schade from the 
Canadian Data Centre and Thakar from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey
Archive Group. In addition Rickett(PPARC) and Fleming(EPSRC) attended
and were able to provide useful up to date 'official' information on 
the PPARC e-Science program. 


Day-1 Program:
--------------

This main sessions consisted of sessions devoted to:

General Assessment: 

	This section included an objective assessment of
the currently available and competing technologies with an
emphasis on existing standards and commerical database systems.
Presentations covered comparative anaylsis of Relational Database
Management Systems(RDMS) and Object Oriented Databases Management
Systems(OODMS) and the CORBA networking application communication
protocol.


The General Context:

	  The general context of the Virtual Observatory initiatives
in the UK, Europewide and in North America was discussed. There was a
consensus that the Astrogrid goal of firm science driven deliverables
in a 3 year time frame was the way to go in contrast to other more
grandiose schemes which promise more but more risky goals on a longer
timescale.  The contributions from Strasbourg were of particular value
since they focused on real solutions to know problems. The simplicity
of the 19 character Bibliographic Code was presented as a simple by
effective standard e.g 2000AAS...197.7802M, which uniquely indentified
bibliographic material. The complexity of the VO problem was
exemplified in the case of the HESSI Solar Satellite which identified
the requirement to access data from 29 different Solar datasets all at
different sites. The ALMA project was presented as an example of a
single telescope with a diverse set of data with particular
emphasis on multi-polarisation, multi-channel, fourier domain
visibility data.

Tools and Techniques focussed on some specific applications:

      Here the focus was on the type of software tools that
the astrogrid program will need, ranging from scientific
analysis tools, through data compression techniques that are
needed for the display of remote data, through to the issue
of how one manages the computing resources. e.g. will one
need a peer review system to allocate resources for specific
scientific investigtions.

Needs and Requirements;

The final session focused on a number of specific scientific
applications and the relationship between the data providers,
the archives, distributed datasets and the scientific user.



Day-2 Program:
--------------

This was a morning sesssion devoted to a round table discussion. 
The topics covered were:


1. User scenarios (Steven Schwartz)
2. Data curation (David Giaretta)
3. Data centres (Francoise Genova)
4. International aspects (Clive Page)
5. Model and observed data (Peter Allan)


Conclusions:

The meeting satisfied a number of different needs and as a result
a number of well formulated responses to the Call for comments have
materialised. One clear concern that was present concerned the
method by which the community could provide input into the astrogrid
program and how one would be able to identify which things the 
astrogrid program would not be delivering. Such concerns are to
be expected in any IT program. Also as mentioned earlier in this
report there is clearly pressure to widen the brief of the
astrogrid program.





Participants
------------

Allen, Gabrielle(Max Planck Institut fuer Gravitationsphysik)
Allan, Peter (RAL)
Bentley, Bob (MSSL)
Boyd, David (RAL)
Butler, Ray (Galway)
Crookes, Danny (Belfast)
Csillaghy, Andre(SSL, Berkeley)
Davenhall, Clive (Edinburgh; Starlink)
Fleming, Jim(EPSRC)
Garrington, Simon (Jodrell)
Genova, Francoise (Strasbourg)
Giaretta, David (RAL)
Goldin, Aaron (Galway)
Holloway, Anthony(Jodrell Bank)
Jeffery, Simon(Armagh)
Lennon, Danny(ING)
Mann, Bob(Edinburgh)
McMahon, Richard(Cambridge)
Mittaz, John(MSSL)
Murtagh, Fionn(Belfast)
Noble, Roger(Jodrell Bank)
Page, Clive(Leicester)
Pike, Dave(RAL)
Richer, John(Cambridge, ALMA Project Scientist)
Rickett, Guy(PPARC)
Rixon, Guy(Cambridge)
Rosen, Simon(MSSL)
Sathyaprakash, B.S. (Cardiff)
Schade, David (CADC)
Schwartz, Steven (QML)
Shearer, Andy (Galway)
Sherman, John (RAL)
Smartt, Stephen (Cambridge, HST)
Ian Taylor (Cardiff)
Thakar, Aniruddha(SDSS)
Trew, Arthur (Edinburgh HPCC)
Wenger, Marc (Strasbourg)