VIRTUAL OBSERVATORIES E-Science ultimate virtual research

VIRTUAL RESEARCH

The Virtual Research is a concept under development for a system to allow transparent distributed data access available worldwide. There are many initiatives aimed at providing seamless access to the ever expanding data resources on-line. This allows scientist to discover, access, analyze, and combine nature and lab data from heterogeneous data collections in a user-friendly manner. A main goal of GRID, VR and VOs initiatives is to give recommendations for the design and implementation of archive systems which are able to cope with a data rate of some terabytes per month. This can be applied to a variety of fields, from Remote Monitoring & Research to Astronomical databases.

VIRTUAL OBSERVATORIES

The Virtual Observatory (VO) is the Virtual Research concept applied to Astronomy, allowing astronomers to discover, access, analyze, and combine astronomical data. A virtual observatory is a collection of interoperating data archives and software tools which utilize the internet to form a scientific research environment in which astronomical research programs can be conducted. In much the same way as a real observatory consists of telescopes, each with a collection of unique astronomical instruments, the VO consists of a collection of data centres each with unique collections of astronomical data, software systems and processing capabilities.

Link to example available at NASA

The long term vision is not one of a fixed specific software package, but rather one of a framework which enables data centers to provide competing and co-operating data services, and which enables software providers to offer a variety of compatible analysis and visualization tools and user interfaces. The first priority for the VO projects worldwide is to develop the standardized framework, which will allow such creative diversity. In InterQuanta we sumarize the VO in three main goals: to have data, literature and processors online and accessible via the Internet. The virtual observatory also creates a wonderful base for teaching astronomy, scientific discovery, and computational science.

1. Virtual Observatories

The international community is building the Virtual Observatory, an organization of this worldwide data into a coherent whole that can be accessed by anyone, in any form, from anywhere. The resulting system will dramatically improve our ability to do multi spectral and temporal studies that integrate data from multiple instruments.

International activities like AVO/NVO below and Grid platforms like AstroGrid have been initiated to enable scientific exploitation across astronomical archives world wide.

1.1 NVO National Virtual Observatory http://www.us-vo.org/

NVO's objective is to enable new science by greatly enhancing access to data and

computing resources. The NVO is developing tools that make it easy to locate,

retrieve, and analyze astronomical data from archives and catalogs worldwide, and to compare theoretical models and simulations with observations. http://nvo.gsfc.nasa.gov/nvo-index.html

1.2 AVO to EURO Virtual Observatory http://www.euro-vo.org

The Astrophysical Virtual Observatory Project started as a three year study for the design and implementation of a virtual observatory for European astronomy. AVO demostrated a smaller-scale science program called ASTROVIRTEL (Accessing Astronomical Archives as Virtual Telescopes). The EURO-VO work programme is now the logical continuation from AVO as a Phase-B deployment of an operational VO in Europe. The European Virtual Observatory aims at deploying an operational Virtual Observatory in Europe.

1.3 Joint Efforts http://ivoa.net

The NVO in USA, AVO in Europe and other international efforts are working together based upon international standards developed in collaboration and under the International Virtual Observatory Alliance (IVOA) umbrella. The IVOA is a standards body created by the VO projects to develop and agree the vital interoperability standards upon which the VO implementations are constructed.

2. Platforms

The underlying platform supporting VOs is the Internet, therefore all the routers and high-speed lines connecting organizations worldwide. On top of Internet there is a set of technologies, ranging from present Web servers to innovative GRIDs. A GRID is a distributed computing infrastructure that facilitates resource-sharing and coordinated problem-solving in dynamic, multi-institutional virtual organizations. Thus, the GRID can be seen as a prototype or model for the VO.

GRID

2.1 UK AstroGrid

The aim of the UK AstroGrid project is to focus on short term deliverables, both relevant application tools and the federation, by the data centres that manage them, of key sky survey datasets, namely: (a) SuperCOSMOS, Sloan, INT-WFC, UKIRT WFCAM, XMM-Newton, Chandra, MERLIN and related VLA datasets; (b) SOHO and Yohkoh; and (c) Cluster and EISCAT. The differences between the data types involved in these federations means that each brings distinct challenges, whose solutions will shed light on generic problems to be faced by the developing global "Virtual Observatory".

3. Existing prototypes and ongoing efforts

Several VO prototypes and demos exist today, you can see from their hosting what university, research center or institution is working on each one, although we like to show them together as part of the common worldwide effort to build VOs.

• Australia VO http://www.aus-vo.org/twiki/bin/view/TWiki/TWikiRegistration

To start with a very interesting initiative and wiki to edit the document between all parties involved. http://www.atnf.csiro.au/_Mail_Archives/ivo

• NASA SkyView Virtual Observatory http://skyview.gsfc.nasa.gov/

A complete VO infrastructure providing views from the professional astronomer to the beginer.

• ESO http://ecf.hq.eso.org/astrovirtel

The European Southern Observatory, with facilities in Chile, is leading the AVO efforts and, since 2000, ESO's Data Management Division started an initiative to face the challenges of the exploding data rate coming from the new instruments of the VLT. Especially ALMA will produce a higher data rate than the whole fully equipped VLT

• ESO/ST-ECF Science Archive http://archive.eso.org

A joint work between ESO and ESA http://www.stecf.org

• http://nvo.ncsa.uiuc.edu/nvoregistration.html

This portal allows data providers to describe their resources--data and services--and make them visible to VO applications. Providers may register a variety of resources, including organizations, data collections, Web Services, traditional HTTP-Get and services browser-based services, as well as the current standard services like Cone Search and Simple Image Access.

• http://mercury.cacr.caltech.edu:8080/carnivore/index.html

A very interesting registry and query portal using the latest XML technologies such as Xquery.

• MAST (STScI Multimission Archive) http://archive.stsci.edu/

is supporting a vast set of initiatives in the VO area, including Galaxy Evolution explorer (Galex) http://galex.stsci.edu/ ,

• INES http://ines.laeff.esa.es/

INES (IUE Newly Extracted Spectra) purpose is to reach the maximum number of scientists and to provide IUE spectra in a form that does not require a detailed knowledge of the instrumental characteristics. INES data have been obtained through processing of the IUE Final Archive output products. The distribution system is structured in three levels: a Principal Centre (Mirrored), several National Hosts, and unlimited End Users .

Developed by the ESA IUE project at VILSPA Spain and is operated and distributed by the Laboratory for Space Astrophysics and Theoretical Physics (LAEFF) , part of the Space Science Division of INTA. http://iuearc.vilspa.esa.es

International Projects and Consortia

InterQuanta is participating actively in several international consortia, in particular those under the umbrella of the EU' Framework Program VI (FP6), therefore we can name here a set of I3 consortia funded by FP6 who are working in VO concepts: RadioNet for radio astronomy http://www.radionet-eu.org/na/n5 , Opticon http://www.astro-opticon.org , and Ilias to name some.

• Recent initiatives

InterQuanta participated in a joint research and private-company effort building a VO registration demo to show concept and models. Next extensions will grow from the very enriching technology experiences of the prototypes above. Future plans include adding http://amanda.berkeley.edu/ to the set of traditional astronomy data, enhanced by InterQuanta's contributions in the latest conference of Neutrino and Dark Matter in 2006.

Present work focus on application of the Particle-Dynamics Model to areas of XML data format standards (VOTable), VO Resource Metadata, Universal Content Descriptions, Space-Time Coordinate Metadata, unified Data Access Layer standards for spectra and images, VO Resource Registries, VO Query Language, unified astronomical Data Models and Web Service technologies for the VO.

4. URL ACCESS AND TECHNICAL DETAILS

The present development efforts at InterQuanta are using Open platforms like Linux and programming languages PHP, Python and Perl. The perl-PDL module is described:

When interfacing with CGI applications, there is a set of URLs where we can test the VO progress:

http://ines.laeff.esa.es/cgi-ines/IUEdbsMY

http://ines.laeff.esa.es/cgi-ines/plotspectra?filename=SWP03101LL.FITS

http://ines.laeff.esa.es/cgi-ines/FITS_HDU?SWP03101LL.FITS

http://ines.laeff.esa.es/cgi-ines/resolve?bib=y&cam=SWP&image=03176

ADS gw http://adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/bib_query?bibcode=1980APJ%2E%2E%2E238%2E%2E133

InterQuanta focused mainly on results, and in the latest years is increasing an open spirit of cooperation with companies, universities and organizations in the field. Among others private efforts in the area a reference is TERAPIX, which pipeline is optimized to process data produced by the MegaPrime CFHT prime focus unit equipped with the giant Megacam camera described in these pages.

In the OECD Global Science Forum workshops (April 2004) on Future Large-Scale Projects and Programmes in Astronomy and Astrophysics, a conclusion was noted "The huge volume of digital information flowing from the new observatories raises the challenges of collecting, using, storing, and sharing data".

URL to Virtual Observatories worldwide