events unimportant: a short history of the vso

Events Unimportant:A Short History of the VSO

Joe GurmanNASA Goddard Space Flight Center

Heliophysics DivisionLaboratory for Solar Physics

andThe VSO Implementers

History, n. An account mostly false, of events unimportant, which are brought about by rulers

mostly knaves, and soldiers mostly fools.- Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictonary

VOiG Session I, 2007•06•12 J.B. Gurman

There was a definite process by which one made people into friends, and it involved talking to them and listening to them

for hours at a time.- Rebecca West

• Rick Bogart, Stanford

• Alisdair Davey, SwRI

• Frank Hill, NSO

• Joe Hourclé, NASA GSFC

• Piet Martens, MSU

• Igor Suàrez-Sola, NSO

• Karen Tian, Stanford

• Keiji Yoshimura, MSU

• Kevin Reardon, Arcetri

2


People that are really very weird can get into sensitive positions and have a tremendous impact on history.

- Dan Quayle

3



- Dan Quayle

• First attempts at a VSO were organized by Bernhard Fleck (1995 - 1997), as the “Whole Sun Catalog”

3



- Dan Quayle


• Unfunded by European sources, 1999

3



- Dan Quayle



• BoF session at 2000 Solar Physics Division meeting in Lake Tahoe, proposal effort led by Frank Hill

3



- Dan Quayle




• Unfunded by NSF, 2001

3



- Dan Quayle





• Parallel effort led by Rick Bogart

3



- Dan Quayle





• Parallel effort led by Rick Bogart

• Unfunded by NASA LWS DATM (now TR&T), 20013


History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives.

- Abba Eban

4



- Abba Eban

• Proposed as leading to the “withering away” of the Solar Data Analysis Center

4



- Abba Eban


• Funded by NASA Sun-Earth Connections senior review, 2001

4



- Abba Eban



• Effort was to include:

4



- Abba Eban




• one-year of design work

4



- Abba Eban




• one-year of design work

• one year of development, two of maintenance

4


Much of the social history of the Western world over the last three decades has involved replacing what worked with what

sounded good. - Thomas Sowell, Is Reality Optional? (1993)

• Two incentives for moving to a distributed data service environment

• Data centers no longer provided either:

• unique expertise or hardware

• services too expensive to distribute

• Prospective mission data sets appeared too large to replicate over the network

5


History repeats itself. That’s one of the things wrong with history.

- Clarence Darrow

• Not even log-linear.... ulp

6


Indeed, what is there that does not appear marvelous when it comes to our knowledge for the first time? How many things, too, are looked upon as quite impossible until they have been actually effected?

- Pliny the Elder, Natural History

• Design, 2002

• Would have like to believe our design was unique

• But similar designs were converged on by NVO, PDS

• So probably just one quasi-optimal way to do this

7


I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural

history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and

porcelain.- John Adams, in a letter to Abigail Adams

8





• Design requirements:

8





• Design requirements:• Distributed

8






• Search for and access multiple missions/observatories/wavelengths without intimate knowledge of the data organization (e.g. by physical observable and/or mission/instrument)

8







• Provide access to analysis software, instrument descriptions, &c. that enable use in scientific research

8







• Provide access to analysis software, instrument descriptions, &c. that enable use in scientific research

• Given the funding level, had to draw a “small box” around a small set of attributes useful for doing science

8


Happy are the people whose annals are blank in history books.

- Thomas Carlyle, Cromwell’s Letter and Speeches

9




• What we decided we couldn’t offer, at least at first:

9





• Data mining (knowledge discovery)

9






• Remote processing: left for EGSO, CoSEC

9







• Grid computing (as opposed to data grids)

9








• Access control (ever)

9








• Access control (ever)

• We wanted only to be in the business of helping data providers to give data away, not preventing its access

9


Web standards keep you out of the dustbin of history.- Josh Greenburg, Digital Preservation and Blogs (SXSW 2006)

10



• Best decisions (in hindsight):

10




• Chose SOAP over various competing methodologies

10





• Were forced to KISS (“small box”) because of very constrained budget

10






• Few non-data services, no public outreach features

10







• Supported by SolarSoft for a good fraction of community’s needs

10








• Continually went to community for input

10









• AAS, SPD, AGU meetings/BoF’s

10









• AAS, SPD, AGU meetings/BoF’s

• Beta testing and feedback

10


Perhaps the history of the errors of mankind, all things considered, is more valuable and interesting than that of

their discoveries.-Benjamin Franklin, Report to the King of France on Animal Magnetism

11




• What we had to change or add

11





• Registry

11





• Registry

• Replication of registry

11





• Registry


• Data model (still being expanded)

11





• Registry



• Writing SOAP servers for some data providers

11





• Registry




• Providing proxies for database-less providers

11





• Registry





• Even some hardware for one data provider

11





• Registry





• Even some hardware for one data provider

• Help in getting IDL-callable API working

11


Women with pasts interest men... they hope history will repeat itself.

- Mae West

• What do we have to offer to newer VxO’s?• One possible model for how a VxO can be architected

• Humility: we have never approached the issues of building a VO with integrated software and/or visualization services

• Solar eye for the plasma guy: a possibly different approach, possibly optimized for remote sensing rather than in situ measurements, and generally accepted file standards

• A test case for tolerance: we view SPASE as a communication protocol for your queries, not a solution to all problems

• A willingness to work with you to build a Heliophysics meta-VO

12


History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.- Winston Churchill

• The real history of this, or any other effort to improve data access and usability for research, will be written by the users.... or those who don’t use our services.

13

events unimportant: a short history of the vso

Documents