Recently, an education and public outreach funding application from the China-VO project was approved by the NSFC. During the next three years, 250k RMB will be delivered to the China-VO to support its education and public outreach (EPO) activities on Virtual Observatory and e-Science concept. These EPO activities will take Worldwide Telescope as their platform, which is a rich interactive learning environment of the Universe populated by the highest resolution ground and space based imagery ever assembled.

On January 4, 2009, the first working day in the year, Information and Computing Center (I&CC) of headquarter of National Astronomical Observatories of Chinese Academy of Sciences (NAOC) was established. The new formed I&CC will be act as the lead and planner of IT related businesses, including China-VO and LAMOST database system, of headquarter of NAOC.

On the last weekend of November 2008, about 60 peoples attended the China-VO 2008, the 7th national VO meeting in China. 28 talks and 3 discussions were presented in the workshop, which made the China-VO 2008 to be the largest one in the history of the China-VO annual meetings. For more details please visit the website of the workshop.

On Nov. 13th, 2008, a joint laboratory, NAOC-TJU Joint Laboratory in Astro-Informatics was established between National Astronomical Observatories, CAS and Tianjin University. NAOC and TJU have been working together on Virtual Observatory for a few years. In the future, the joint laboratory will act as a base of cooperation between NAOC and TJU. Further collaborated research and developments on VO, LAMOST, and many other software and network related projects are going to be planed and initiated.

After great effort of more then one year, the SDSS DR6 datasets ware fully mirrored at National Astronomical Observatories, CAS (NAOC). A mirror website is built at:
http://sdss.lamost.org
The available resources include:
SkyServer BestDR6 (2500GB)
http://skyserver.lamost.org/skyserver/
SkyServer SegueDR6 (500GB)
http://skyserver.lamost.org/segue/
Spectra DR6 (300GB)
http://info.bao.ac.cn/download/astronomy/sdss/data/spectro/
Images DR6 (10TB)
http://sdss.lamost.org/das/DR6/imaging/

Please download it at: http://www.aspbooks.org/a/volumes/table_of_contents/?book_id=420

During the last few months, the first scientific paper appeared from the China-VO group. Using VO-DAS (VO Data Access Service), Dr. Chao LIU and his colleagues searched Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) DR5 photometric data with 120d< α < 270d, 25d < δ < 70d for new Milky Way companions or substructures in the Galactic halo. Five candidates were identified as over dense faint stellar sources that have color-magnitude diagrams similar to those of known globular clusters, or dwarf spheroidal galaxies.

FitHAS is an easy-to-use assistant tool for FITS header archiving, which is developed by Chinese Virtual Observatory (China-VO) team and IBM Center of Tianjin University. The tool provides graphic interface and wizard guiding an archive manager or data provider to extract header information from one or more FITS files (*.fit, *.fits, *.fit.gz, *.fits.gz) and import it to a table.
Please visit here for more information.

The 2007 Spring IVOA Interop Meeting was held successfully in Beijing, more information is available here.

Following the 270,000 RMB (~ 34,000 USD) NSFC funding for SkyMouse R&D, another small piece of NSFC funding was granted to China-VO team. The term of the new funding is 3 years with a total number of 240,000 RMB (~30,000 USD). The funding will be mainly used on research and development of VO-DAS.