The first major discovery to be made with the Virtual Observatory was announced today to the press.
The AVO science team discovered thirty-one previously undetected powerful supermassive black holes in the so-called GOODS (Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey) fields. The paper describing these results will be published in an upcoming issue of Astronomy & Astrophysics.
This afternoon, Mr. Keith Noddle, technical lead of the AstroGrid, visited National Astronomical Observatory of China (NAOC). Keith gave a report to the graduates at NAOC, "AstroGrid, Building a working Virtual Observatory". After the report, Keith and the China-VO members had a technical talk.
VOTFilter is an XML filter for OpenOffice Calc developed by Chinese Virtual Observatory (China-VO) consortium. Using the filter, you can read/write files in VOTable format, edit and analyze VOTable data using OpenOffice Calc. It's a fully integrated package tool, you need not know anything about JAVA programming.
The second release candidate of 1.0 version is available for download from: http://services.china-vo.org/vofilter/
"VOTFilter", an XML filter, lets you read and write VOTable files using OpenOffice.org Calc.
The "VOTFilter" is under heavy developing in China-VO project. As the first step, we finished an import filter. With it, you can load VOTable files into OpenOffice.org Calc.
In the near future, an output filter will be developed and "binary and FITS" format VOTable file will be supported.
Chenzhou Cui visited IUCAA at Pune University from Feb. 29 to Mar. 13, 2004. During his visit, Chenzhou Cui talked with the India-VO members widely and gave a report at the IUCAA about "Chinese Astronomical Instruments and Chinese Virtual Observatory".
On 25-25 September 2003, the second national China-VO technical meeting was held at National Astronomical Observatory of China (NAOC). Representatives from NAOC, YunNan Observatory, Tsinghua Univ., Peking Univ., Nanjing Univ., Central China Normal Univ., Beijing Normal Univ., Beijing Planetarium, Computer Network Information Center CAS, and other related organizations participated this meeting.
In the morning, senior members of the China-VO (Yongheng ZHAO, Chenzhou CUI) and the AIRE (Jianfeng ZHOU, Rui QI) discussed how to enhance the cooperation between the projects at NAOC.
They came to the consensus that funding and personnel of the two projects were limited, and it was necessary to joint together to accelerate the R&D of VO in China.
Based on the GT3 alpha, "Hello China-VO", the first Grid service of mine, is completed, which is a little program just for testing. Its function is very simple, to return the inputted string or to act as a counter.
Chenzhou CUI
