International Virtual Observatory Alliance

The International Virtual Observatory Alliance or IVOA is a worldwide scientific organisation formed in June 2002. Its mission is to facilitate international coordination and collaboration necessary for enabling global and integrated access to data gathered by astronomical observatories. An information system allowing such an access is called a Virtual Observatory. The main task of the organisation so far has focused on defining standards to ensure interoperability of the different virtual observatory projects already existing or in development.

The IVOA now comprises 19 VO projects from Argentina, Armenia, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Europe, France, Germany, Hungary, India, Italy, Japan, Korea, Russia, Spain, Ukraine, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Membership is open to other national and international projects according to the IVOA Guidelines for Participation.

Senior representatives from each national VObs project form the IVOA Executive Committee. A chair is chosen from among the representatives and serves a 1.5 year term, preceded by a 1.5 year term as deputy chair. The Executive Committee meets 3-4 times a year to discuss goals, priorities, and strategies.

IVOA currently brings together nineteen member organisations, both national and international :

The tasks of the IVOA are distributed over different working groups:

The IVOA Applications Working Group is concerned primarily with the software tools that Astronomers use to access VO data and services for doing Astronomy. The role of the Applications Working Group is to:

The task of the Data Access Layer (DAL) working group is to define and formulate VO standards for remote data access. Client data analysis software will use these services to access data via the VO framework; data providers will implement these services to publish data to the VO.

The DAL working groups has defined various standards for accessing data sets, in particular images (Simple Image Access Protocol, SIAP6), spectra (Simple Spectra Access Protocol, SSAP7) and source catalogues (Simple Cone Search, SCS8).

The role of the Data Modelling Working Group is to provide a framework for the description of metadata attached to observed or simulated data. The activity of the Data Model WG activity focuses on logical relationships between these metadata, examines how an astronomer wants to retrieve, process and interpret astronomical data, and provides an architecture to handle them. What is defined in this WG can then be re-used in the protocols defined by the DAL WG or in VO aware applications.

The aim of the Grid and Web Services(GWS) Working Group is to define the use of Grid technologies and web services within the VO context and to investigate, specify, and implement required standards in this area. This group was formed from a merger of the Web Services group and the Grid group, ordered at the IVOA Executive meeting held during the IAU General Assembly in 2003.

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