2nd VALD3-VAMDC meeting

Participants:

Agenda:

1. Preparation of the VALD3 data content.

T. Ryabchikova explained to situation with the data collection and conversion to the VALD3 format. The plan is to complete this task in September 2010. The complexity of the work is related to the amount of data, the need to homogenize and verify energy level designations and large number of the new contributions primarily from Kurucz, NIST, Liege, London etc.

2. Conversion of the ASCII tables to binary files

N. Piskunov presented to extensions of the conversion tool vald2_ascii2bin to cross-linked tables and multi-line records as well as the ability to handle escape sequences (e.g. a space inside a term designation "\ " as opposed to a space as a delimiter " "). T. Marquart pointed out that similar tool is developed as part of the VAMDC WP7 Publishing Tools which opens an opportunity for direct comparison and verification of the results.

3. VALD3-VAMDC interface and software recycling

The preparation of the VALD3 has many similarities with the goals of the VAMDC WP7 and can be used for direct verification of the strategy and the software under development. T. Marquart proposed to configure and create a mySQL database using the (merged) VALD3 content as produced by the preselect3 tool. The idea is to demonstrate Option B of the Publishing Tool plan using an open source DB instrumented with the VAMDC interface. Thomas will implement this in April and we will use this example for demonstration for the EU in Paris.

4. VALD3 term designations.

Yu. Ryabtsev presented the final and complete set of rules for describing energy levels for atoms and simple molecules to be included in VALD3. N. Piskunov presented a simple conversion program written in C for parsing the VALD3 term strings and extract the XSAMS keyword values according to the VAMDC standards. In the process 2 bugs in the XSAMS 0.1 standard have been found and reported to the XSAMS board. They will be fixed in the next version of the standard. Yu. Pakhomov incorporated the conversion utility to the his java-based VALD3-VAMDC interface, which supports the XSAMS format of the data.

5. Referencing and the bibliography.

In order to keep track of the use of data and cite the data producers VALD3 intends to simplify the task of collecting references to the end user. T. Ryabchikova promised to compile the list of all data sets to be included in VALD3 and all the unique labels used inside the VALD3 records (source of the gf values). F. Kupka will compile a bibTeX file with all the relevant literature to be added to the extracted data. Ch. Stuez will look into creation of the subroutines for searching and parsing the bibTeX file.