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.

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".