Google Summer of Code 2013 Astroquery
Overview: Astroquery is an affiliated package of Astropy developed to allow astronomers to access online Astronomical databases. This is a most useful toolkit, but requires extensive refactoring, testing, documentation and implementation of new services before it conforms to a clean and consistent API and becomes suitable for a stable release. This project intends to do exhaustive work on the Astroquery package to get it into a usable and stable form for fruitful utilization by the Astronomical community.
[May 28 to June 16] Community Bonding Period:
- Set up the required development & testing environment on my local system.
- Familiarize myself with Astropy's coding and documentation style guides.
- Become completely familiar with Astropy's and Astroquery's codebase.
- Interact with the Astropy-community and mentors to finalize on a clean and consistent API for Astroquery.
- Get familiar with popular online Astronomical data services and brush up on the required Astronomical terms and parameters.
In the subsequent weeks we intend to tackle each module in the Astroquery API one by one. The following is the action plan for each module in the API. Note that each step will be accompanied with testing and documentation before moving on.
Action Plan
- Exhaustively test and examine the existing module code to find bugs, Python 3.x incompatibilities and deviations from the API designed in the previous step.
- Rewrite/Re-factor the parts of the source as found from step-1.
- Write code for unimplemented portions of the module's interface.
- Write code for enhancements and new use-cases as per input from the Astropy community.
- Check and revise code for any missed-out optimizations.
With this action plan, here is a tentative break up for each module:
[June 17 - 23]:
Apply action plan on irsa and irsa_dust modules.
[June 24 - 30]: Apply action plan on ukidss, magpis and nrao modules.
[July 1 - 7]: Apply action plan on simbad module.
[July 8 - 21]: Apply action plan on besancon, ned and vizier modules.
[July 22 - 28]: Catch-up period for new issues/ pending implementations so far.
MID-TERM EVALUATIONS
[July 29 - Aug 4]: Apply action plan on nist and fermi modules.
[Aug 5 - 25]: Add new modules for interfacing with other available web-services such as SDSS, TeVCat, CDS -xmatch services, ADS.
[Aug 26 - Sep 1]: Implement enhancements and demanded features that were missed out in the previous step.
[Sep 2 - 15]: Exhaustively test the source, and also look at package installation and usage issues.
SUGGESTED PENCILS DOWN DATE
[Sep 16 - 22]: Final week to scrub the code, add finishing touches and finalize documentation.
SUBMIT CODE FOR EVALUATION
The project's progress through summer will be updated on the blog: http://ping-vyom.blogspot.in/
The student participating in this project is Madhura Parikh. Please feel free to contact at madhuraparikh@gmail.com.
Additional Notes: The work done after August 12th will not be a part of the GSoC evaluation.