volute: a shared repository for the VO

The volute repository is intended to act as an area for inter-project collaboration between participants in the IVOA. Joint work on ad-hoc projects can be a bit of a fuss if participants don't come from the same group (such as AstroGrid, Euro-VO, NVO, and so on), and so can't easily get access to a common code repository; and sometimes wikis just aren't enough.

Slices currently here:

| Tree | Description | Contact person | |:---------|:----------------|:-------------------| | /projects/dal | Standards dealing with VO data access | Markus Demleitner | | /projects/dm | Various DM WG projects | Omar Laurino | | /projects/edu | IVOA's education WG develops its standards documents here; it also has a repository for tutorials and similar "content" documents hosted elsewhere | Markus Demleitner | | /projects/grid | PHP VOSpace endpoint for iRODS | Paul Harrison | | /projects/ivoapub | Tools for authoring IVOA documents (current development: IVOATeX) | Paul Harrison | | /projects/note-urifragments | IVOA Note on URI fragments | Norman Gray | | /projects/ontologies | There's some collaborative development, and distribution, of the CDS Ontology of Astronomical Object types (more ontologies might appear here in future) | Norman Gray | | /projects/registry | The Registry working group develops its standards here | Markus Demleitner | | /projects/rest-in-vo | The 'REST in the VO' draft is hosted here, under the auspices of the Grid and Web Services group | André Schaaff | | /projects/samp | Files related to the Applications group's SAMP work | Mark Taylor | | /projects/std-vounits | Text of the VOUnits document | Norman Gray | | /projects/theory | Theory group" a repository for draft of the VO-Theory standards (SimDM, SimDAL, ...) as well as the VO-URP source code developed by Gerard Lemson and Laurent Bourges, allowing to quickly set up a SimDB; see also TheoryHome | Franck Le Petit | | /projects/utypes | DM utypes work | Omar Laurino | | /projects/vocabularies | The Semantics group's vocabulary project; there are more details at VocabulariesHome | Norman Gray | | /projects/votable | Files related to the Applications group's VOTable work, currently just the document text for collaborative/transparent editing | Mark Taylor |

You want to create another tree under /projects? There shouldn't be a problem, but it would be best to talk to one of the 'contact persons' first (see the list above), and discuss where to put it.

If you want to receive notification of commits to the repository, subscribe to the volute-commits@googlegroups.com mailing list.

What does volute mean?

Nothing very deep -- it's a nice word, and it starts with 'VO'. A volute is (or if you're Italian, volute are) part of the decoration within Ionic capitals; they're also a type of sea-snail.

More to come...