The Electronic Geophysical Year: 2007-2008

Working Group on Virtual Observatories

Terms of Reference

Background:

The purpose of a Virtual Observatory is to increase efficiency, and enable new science by greatly enhancing access to data, services, and computing resources. A Virtual Observatory is a suite of software applications on a set of computers that allows users to uniformly find, access, and use resources (data, documents, software, processing capability, image products, and services) from distributed product repositories and service providers. A Virtual Observatory may have a single subject (for example, the Virtual Solar Observatory) or several grouped under a theme (the Virtual Solar-Terrestrial Observatory, http://www.vsto.org/). A Virtual Observatory will typically take the form of an internet portal or web services offering users features among the following.

  • Tools that make it easy to locate and retrieve data from catalogs, archives, and databases worldwide
  • Tools for data analysis, simulation, and visualization
  • Tools to compare observations with results obtained from models, simulations, and theory.
  • Interoperability: services that can be used regardless of the clients computing platform, operating system, and software capabilities
  • Access to data in near real-time, archived data, and historical data.
  • Additional information - documentation, user-guides, reports, publications, news, and so on.

This Working Group focuses on Virtual Observatories (Data Grids, Distributed Data Systems, Virtual Laboratories, etc.) for the management of geophysical and geospace data for all users.

Objectives:

The eGY Virtual Observatory Working Group will

  • Work with the other eGY working groups (best practices, data integration, data rescue, education/outreach and virtual research environments),
  • Participate in workshops, conferences and seminars to promote eGY principles and VO capabilities,
  • Document the existing VO paradigm and implementations broadly across Earth and space sciences and set forward challenges for the future.
  • Encourage the publication of results in appropriate journals and solicit broad public comment.

Current and past activities:

  • Coming

Caveats:

TBD.