EuroVO-DCA project: DCA Census Questionnaires

The Euro-VO Data Centre Alliance (http://www.euro-vo.org/pub/dca/overview.html) project was a Coordination Action funded by the European Commission within the Sixth Framework Program. It aims at helping European astronomical data centres to publish their data and services in the Virtual Observatory, using standards defined by the International Virtual Observatory Alliance (IVOA). EuroVO-DCA operated by coordinating the sharing of expertise, organizing Workshops, and providing assistance, in particular through the national VO projects and by technical visit of experts.

The European community of Data Centres was not well identified. In order for the DCA to provide the best possible service to help Data Centres participate in the VO, we conducted a census of data centres to understand their characteristics and needs.

The information collected in this census provided a snapshot of the European Data Centre Community, and guided the preparation of workshops, tutorials and other assistance programs to help Data Centres 'publish to the VO'.

European Data Centres encompass a wide diversity of data and services, and the DCA adopts a broad and inclusive definition of a Data Centre (http://cds.u-strasbg.fr/twikiDCA/bin/view/EuroVODCA/DataCentresinVO). The census questions aimed to capture the basic information that characterise Data Centres in terms of their content, services and current interfaces.

The public version of the EuroVO-DCA Census is now available. .

The census was organised into 5 questionnaires:

• Introduction and Identification of the Data Centre (questionnaire #1)
• Observational Archives and Data Products (questionnaire #2)
• Services / Tools / Software Suites (questionnaire #3)
• Theoretical Archives (questionnaire #4)
• Theory Services (questionnaire #5)

Each Data Centre was asked to fill the present questionnaire to identify itself. The acronym given as the first answer to this form was used as reference to make the link with other questionnaires. Data Centres that host multiple archives, services, theory archive, or theory service were then requested to provide separate responses for each archive, tool or service, using the relevant form(s). Each questionnaire took between 15 and 30 minutes to complete.

Some Data Centres may not fit neatly into the categories of this census. In these cases we strongly encouraged use of the 'extra information' boxes in the form. We needed to get as complete as possible answers, but the DC were encouraged to feel free to leave questions blank if they were not able to provide the requested information.

The questionnaires are relatively detailed and we encouraged the DC to have a look at the list of questions available below (pdf or Word files) before beginning to answer the online questionnaire. If they prefered, they could answer by filling the Word questionnaires available on this webpage instead of the on-line form. For the questions of implementation of IVOA standards, DC were asked to refer to the list given in http://www.ivoa.net/Documents.

When completed, DC were asked to send a message to the two contacts below, indicating their Data Centre acronym and how many questionnaires of each type they had filled for this Data Centre. Deadline was first set by January 25, 2008 and then extended to February 1, 2008.

Contact persons:

- Mathias Depretz (depretz@astro.u-strasbg.fr), - Françoise Genova (genova@astro.u-strasbg.fr).

Here are the questionnaires in word file :

• Introduction and Identification of the Data Centre (questionnaire #1)
• Observational Archives and Data Products (questionnaire #2)
• Services / Tools / Software Suites (questionnaire #3)
• Theoretical Archives (questionnaire #4)
• Theory Services (questionnaire #5)

Here are the questionnaires in pdf file :

• Introduction and Identification of the Data Centre (questionnaire #1)
• Observational Archives and Data Products (questionnaire #2)
• Services / Tools / Software Suites (questionnaire #3)
• Theoretical Archives (questionnaire #4)
• Theory Services (questionnaire #5)

-- MathiasDepretz - 09 Oct 2009

• EuroVO-DCA_D5_CNRS_Public.pdf: EuroVO-DCA_D5_CNRS_Public.pdf