ADASS 2002 Trip Report

Virtual Observatory Technologies

• Rapid Development: Java runtime speed catching up?

• UDDI Not a Panacea; XML/SOAP Performance problematic.

• eSTAR: prototype grid of robotic telescopes. "Databases/Archives are special case of Telescope".

InterOperability

• Sky Indexing System: how to map region of sky to urls of different catalogs etc.

• Joining Source Catalogs in RDBMS: B-trees: 1% of sky (gsc, usno-a2) indexed in trial, 1/4 size. PostgresQL backend. Looks promising.

• Interoperability: ISO Data and XMM-Newton Science Archives: Java, XML. Interesting, but their java applet crashes my browser!