The China-VO group got good news this month when SkyMouse received critical government funding. A three-year, RMB270,000 award to the China-VO team is announced by the National Science Foundation China recently. The funding will provide strong support to the development of SkyMouse system.

Chinese Virtual Observatory annual meeting for the year (China-VO 2005) was held successfully at Shandong University at Weihai from November 25th to 27th. About 30 representatives from National Astronomical Observatories, Beijing Normal Univ., Central China Normal Univ., CNIC CAS, Tianjin Univ., Yunnan Univ. and Shandong Univ. at Weihai, attended the meeting. 20 talks were presented on all VO related fields, esp. on China-VO R&D. All related materials about the meeting including slides, pictures and other documents will be available at the meeting website soon.

VOTable2XHTML 2.0 is now available for download. VOTable2HTML is an XSLT stylesheet that can be used to transform a VOTable file into XHTML file. For more details, please visit: http://services.china-vo.org/votable2xhtml/

VOFilter 2.0 is now available for download. VOFilter is an XML filter for OpenOffice Calc developed by the China-VO project. Using the filter, you can open VOTable files, edit and analyze them with OpenOffice Calc. VOFilter a fully integrated application, you need not know anything about JAVA and XML programming skills. In the new version, VOTable 1.1 and the latest OpenDocument 1.0 file format are supported. JRE version dependence problem in previous version is fixed. To download the package and learn more about it, please visit our webpage at: http://services.china-vo.org/vofilter/

With the help of China-VO, BATC catalogs are available now at the CDS system, both in FTP categories and VizieR database. It is probably the largest dataset so far that our Chinese astronomers contribute to the international community.

The internal training of China-VO group has completed successfully on Mar 18, 2005 in the National Astronomical Observatory. All the postgraduates in the China-VO group attended the study. The study has been divided into three parts. First of all, we studied some IVOA standards and protocols, therefore we have got full understanding of the development blueprint of the IVOA. After that we tested the prototype of Astrogrid and some demos of AVO. Unfortunately, the new release of astrogrid will not be available until Mar 31, 2005, so several services are temporarily unavailable.

To plot out a long-term roadmap for the China-VO, a closed-door high-end meeting was held at National Astronomical Observatory of China on Nov. 14. More then ten leading astronomers in China and two computer experts attended the meeting. A China-VO steering committee was established, some technique working groups were proposed.

Chinese Virtual Observatory (China-VO) project was initiated by National Astronomical Observatories of China (NAOC) in 2002. The China-VO focuses its main effort on IVOA Standard Implementation and Application Services. The R&D focuses mainly include 5 fields: China-VO platform construction, transparent data access service for national and international astronomical data, legacy astronomical application integration, astronomical instrument integration, and VO-based astronomy education.

The third national China-VO meeting will be held in Wuhan from November 23 to 28. Please visit meeting website for details.

5 papers submitted by China-VO members to the SPIE conference (ASTRONOMICAL TELESCOPES AND INSTRUMENTATION 2004) are available for download.