Toward an International Virtual Observatory

The book is the first thorough overview of the first important steps to develop a worldwide virtual observatory so that, in the future, it could be easier to "dial-up" a part of the sky than wait many months to access a telescope. The articles in this book present details on the status of the first efforts to develop a standardized framework for the virtual observatory, including steps towards completion and deployment of technical infrastructure, uptake by data providers worldwide, and utilization by the scientific community.

Includes supplementary material: sn.pub/extras

Inhalt
Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Clouds-Over the Twenty-First Century Virtual Observatory.-Building the Infrastructure for the National Virtual Observatory.- An Astronomical Wide-Field Imaging System for Europe.-The Canadian Virtual Observatory Project.-Information Hub of the Russian Virtual Observatory.-Early Virtual Science: Some Lessons for the AVO.-The Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey: A VO Test Case?.- Visualizing and Analyzing Massive Astronomical Datasets with Partiview.-Science and the Grid.-National Virtual Observatory Architecture.-Authentication and Authorization Architecture for AstroGrid and the Virtual Observatory.- VO Activities at the Harvard-Smithsonian CfA.-The Prototype TNG Long-Term Archive and its Interactions with the Italian GRID Project.- Federation and Fusion of Astronomical Information:Standards and Tools for the Virtual Observatories.- Data Models for the VO.-Scalable Metadata Definition Frameworks.-Space-Time Metadata for the Virtual Observatory.-VOTable: Tabular Data for the Virtual Observatory.-A C-++ Parser for VOTables.-ASTROVIRTEL: Tools and Operations.-Towards an AVO Interoperability Prototype.-Inter-Operability of ESA Science Archives.- The AstroGrid Pilot Programme.-Making Ground-Based Optical/Infrared Imaging Surveys VO-Compatible.- e-Star: Telescopes and Databases as a Single Information Grid.-Massive Variability Search and Monitoring by OGLE and ASAS.-Statistical Analysis of Observed and Simulated Surveys.-Catalogue Intersection: Beyond Basic Cross Correlations.-Meeting the User Science Challenge for a Virtual Universe.-Theoretical Astrophysics and the US-NVO Initiative.-Artificial Intelligence Tools for Data Mining in Large Astronomical Databases.-Data Mining Facility.-Automatic Detection - Extraction Classification fora Large Number of Stellar Spectra from Slitless Wide Field Spectroscopy. A Project for AVO.-Star-Forming Regions at High Resolution: Interferometry for Virtual Observatories.-TheAstronomical Data Warehouse.-The Real Astronomy Experience: Making the IVO Effective for International Planetaria and Science Centers.-Enabling Outreach with Virtual Observatories.- Poster Papers: Building the MEGA Image-Subtraction Pipeline in the Era of Virtual Observatories.-Visualisation Tools for Very Large Amounts of Data.-Laplacean Ideology for Preliminary Orbit Determination and Moving Celestial Body Identification in Virtual Epoch.-Using XML-Schema to Model Data from Present and Future Astronomical Databases.-The Virtual Observatory as a Tool to Study Star Cluster Populations in Starburst Galaxies.-The Master Catalogue of Stars Towards the Magellanic Clouds.-UCDs: Metadata for the VO.-Applicability of Emerging Resource Discovery Standards to the VO.-The Astronomy Digital Library and the VO.-The Digitized Hamburg Objective Prism Surveys.-Aladin in the VO Context.-Power Spectrum for the Distribution of Galaxies an the Sphere.-The World Space Observatory (WSO/UV) Archive: Requirements for Interoperation.- A Common Data Analysis Environment: Do We Need One?.-Multiwavelength Studies of AGN.-The CCD Sky Patrols and Plate Archives.-Wide-Field X-Ray Monitoring as Data Source for Virtual Observatory.-The UDAPAC Project - Uccle Direct Astronomical Plate Archive Centre: A New International Facility for Inherited Observations.-The Russian Virtual Observatory Portal. Convenience and Attractiveness.-IDHA Image Archive Model.-Building Interoperable NASA Archives.-iAstro: Computational and Information Infrastructure in the Astronomical DataGrid.-PRIME: A Deep Near-Infrared Survey Project.-Practical Approach to Catalogued-Data Visualisation.-Multi-Object Spectroscopy: Automatic Extraction and Previewing of Spectra.- The INTEGRAL Archive at the ISDC.-HyperLeda: Virtual Instruments for Extragalactic Astronomy.-A Galactic Model as a Useful Tool for Virtual Observatories.-The SolarWeb Semantic Data Model for Describing Relationships Between Heterogeneous Solar Database