Planetary Science Virtual Observatory architecture

In the framework of the Europlanet-RI program, a prototype of Virtual Observatory dedicated to Planetary Science was defined. Most of the activity was dedicated to the elaboration of standards to retrieve and visualize data in this field, and to provide light procedures to teams who wish to contribute with on-line data services. The architecture of this VO system and selected solutions are presented here, together with existing demonstrators

Atlasmaker: A Grid-based Implementation of the Hyperatlas

The Atlasmaker project is using Grid technology, in combination with NVO interoperability, to create new knowledge resources in astronomy. The product is a multi-faceted, multi-dimensional, scientifically trusted image atlas of the sky, made by federating many different surveys at different wavelengths, times, resolutions, polarizations, etc. The Atlasmaker software does resampling and mosaicking of image collections, and is well-suited to operate with the Hyperatlas standard. Requests can be satisfied via on-demand computations or by accessing a data cache. Computed data is stored in a distributed virtual file system, such as the Storage Resource Broker (SRB). We expect these atlases to be a new and powerful paradigm for knowledge extraction in astronomy, as well as a magnificent way to build educational resources. The system is being incorporated into the data analysis pipeline of the Palomar-Quest synoptic survey, and is being used to generate all-sky atlases from the 2MASS, SDSS, and DPOSS surveys for joint object detection.Comment: Published in the Proceedings of ADASS XI

Science with the Virtual Observatory: the AstroGrid VO Desktop

We introduce a general range of science drivers for using the Virtual Observatory (VO) and identify some common aspects to these as well as the advantages of VO data access. We then illustrate the use of existing VO tools to tackle multi wavelength science problems. We demonstrate the ease of multi mission data access using the VOExplorer resource browser, as provided by AstroGrid (http://www.astrogrid.org) and show how to pass the various results into any VO enabled tool such as TopCat for catalogue correlation. VOExplorer offers a powerful data-centric visualisation for browsing and filtering the entire VO registry using an iTunes type interface. This allows the user to bookmark their own personalised lists of resources and to run tasks on the selected resources as desired. We introduce an example of how more advanced querying can be performed to access existing X-ray cluster of galaxies catalogues and then select extended only X-ray sources as candidate clusters of galaxies in the 2XMMi catalogue. Finally we introduce scripted access to VO resources using python with AstroGrid and demonstrate how the user can pass on the results of such a search and correlate with e.g. optical datasets such as Sloan. Hence we illustrate the power of enabling large scale data mining of multi wavelength resources in an easily reproducible way using the VO.Comment: 8 pages; 7 figures; proceedings of invited talk at "Multi wavelength astronomy and the Virtual Observatory" conference, December 2008, EuroVO-AIDA program, European Space Astronomy Centre, Spai