International Virtual Observatory Alliance Research Articles

Towards a VO compliant ESO science archive

Data centres have a major role in the Virtual Observatory (VO), as they are the primary source of astronomical data. The VO cannot (and does not) dictate how a data centre handles its own archive. However, ‘VO-layer’ is needed to ‘translate’ any locally defined parameter to the standard (i.e., International Virtual Observatory Alliance compliant) ones. The longer term vision of the VO is also to hide away any observatory/telescope/instrument specific detail and work in astronomical units, for example, ‘wavelength range’ and not grism or filter name. Data providers are then advised to systematically collect metadata (‘data about data’) about the curation process, assign unique identifiers, describe the general content (e.g., physical coverage) of a collection, and provide interface and capability parameters of public services. Finally, the VO will work at its best with high-level (‘science-ready’) data, so that the VO user is spared as much as possible any complex and time consuming data reduction. Data centres should then make an effort to provide such data.

VOFilter: Bridging Virtual Observatory and Industrial Office Applications

VOFilter is an XML based filter developed by the Chinese Virtual Observatory project to transform tabular data files from VOTable format into OpenDocument format. VOTable is an XML format defined for the exchange of tabular data in the context of the Virtual Observatory (VO). It is the first Proposed Recommendation defined by International Virtual Observatory Alliance, and has obtained wide support from both the VO community and many Astronomy projects. OpenOffice.org is a mature, open source, and front office application suite with the advantage of native support of industrial standard OpenDocument XML file format. Using the VOFilter, VOTable files can be loaded in OpenOffice.org Calc, a spreadsheet application, and then displayed and analyzed as other spreadsheet files. Here, the VOFilter acts as a connector, bridging the coming VO with current industrial office applications. We introduce Virtual Observatory and technical background of the VOFilter. Its workflow, installation and usage are presented. Existing problems and limitations are also discussed together with the future development plans.

Data standards for the international virtual observatory

A primary goal of the International Virtual Observatory Alliance, which brings together Virtual Observatory Projects from 16 national and international development projects, is to develop, evaluate, test, and agree upon standards for astronomical data formatting, data discovery, and data delivery. In the three years that the IVOA has been in existence, substantial progress has been made on standards for tabular data, imaging data, spectroscopic data, and large-scale databases and on managing the metadata that describe data collections and data access services. In this paper, I describe how the IVOA operates and give my views as to why such a broadly based international collaboration has been able to make such rapid progress.

The Russian Virtual Observatory project

We describe the Russian Virtual Observatory (RVO), a prestigious international project sponsored by the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS). In 2001, the RAS Scientific Council on Astronomy included this project in a list of the most important international projects of the RAS. Its main goal to create and develop the RVO, intended to provide Russian astronomers with direct and effective access to worldwide astronomical data resources. The RVO is one component of the International Virtual Observatory (IVO), a system in which vast astronomical archives and databases around the world, together with analysis tools and computational services, are linked together into an integrated facility. The IVO unites all important national and international projects to create virtual observatories, coordinated by the International Virtual Observatory Alliance. The RVO is one of the organizers and an important participant of the IVO Alliance.

USING VIRTUAL OBSERVATORY TOOLS FOR ASTRONOMICAL RESEARCH

Construction of the Virtual Observatory (VO) is a great concern to the astronomical community in the 21st century. We present an outline of the concept and necessity of the va and the current status of various VO projects including the 15 national ones and the International Virtual Observatory Alliance (IVOA). We summarize the possible science cases that could be solved by using the VO data/tools, real science cases which are the results of using current VO tools, and our own work of using AstroGrid, the United Kingdom national VO, for a research on star formation history of galaxies.

TIPTOPbase

AbstractAn overview of the online atomic database referred to as TIPTOPbase is given, in particular its opacity server (OPserver) and current developments regarding online atomic structure calculations. Efforts to include atomic data for X-ray line modeling and to integrate TIPTOPbase within the International Virtual Observatory Alliance (IVOA) are also mentioned.

Downloading the sky [virtual observatory

An international collaboration of astronomers and computer scientists is piecing together the means to connect all stored data collected over the last several decades by hundreds of ground-based and orbiting observatories in thousands of archives. Their efforts will create the world's biggest and best telescope, known as the Virtual Observatory. VO will allow astronomers, as well as students and the general public to easily locate and download research data over the Internet. VO will also serve as a grid computing network, giving researchers, regardless of location of resources, the equivalent of a supercomputer on their desktops, for comparing billion-record archives or running large-scale simulations. VO encompasses a patchwork of projects organized under the International Virtual Observatory Alliance. The alliance includes more than 200 astronomers and computer scientists in at least 13 countries. Through the VO's various working groups, the scientists are hammering out standards to make the archives interoperable, outlining the necessary IT infrastructure, and defining the VO's scientific goals.