ESO VO

ESO has been one of the founding fathers of the Virtual Observatory (VO),starting from 2000 when ESO and the Space Telescope European Coordinating Facility (ST-ECF) hosted the first EC-funded (Fifth Framework Programme, FP5) demonstration programme ASTROVIRTEL (2000-2003), and supporting, since, all European-wide and world-wide VO initiatives: the Astrophysical Virtual Observatory (AVO, 2002-2004), the Euro-VO (2004-present), and the International Virtual Observatory Alliance (IVOA, 2002-present).


ESO has tasked the Virtual Observatory Project Office (VOP) to implement the Virtual Observatory concept:

Virtual Observatory concept

To facilitate the international coordination and collaboration necessary for the development and deployment of the tools, systems and organizational structures necessary to enable the international utilization of astronomical archives as an integrated and interoperating virtual observatory.


VOP is the contact point for all VO activities at ESO.

Responsibilities

Within ESO:


Current projects:


Past projects:

  • AIDA FP7 project (completed July 2010):
    • WP4 (Service activities of VO-enabled science services) lead: Research initiative, Science Advisory Committee, Science Workshops
    • WP5 (Outreach)
    • WP6 (Evolution of VO standards)
    • WP7 (Data access protocols and data models)
  • DCA FP6 project (completed end 2008): Workshop organization, on-site support to data centres
  • VOTECH FP6 project (completed end 2008): DS4 (user tools) lead, plus others

 

Virtual Observatory Project Office

The Virtual Observatory Project Office, created in June 2008 as an evolution of the Virtual Observatory Systems Departement, is part of the ESO Data Management and Operations Division (DMO). VOP is tasked with providing Virtual Observatory (VO) input to ESO in general, and to the DMO Archive and Data Products Departments in particular, and with coordinating ESO's involvement in the VO, namely in the Euro-VO project and theInternational Virtual Observatory Alliance (IVOA).

In practice this means making sure that ESO's data products, metadata and relative tools and services are interoperable and up-to-date and that ESO's voice is heard at the international level when data access and exchange standards are discussed.

VOP is headed by Paolo Padovani. Alberto Micol leads the Virtual Observatory Standards group. Evanthia Hatziminaoglou is the Euro-VO Facility Centre astronomer.

 

Related links

* E-ELT FP7

* ESO Archive

* ESO Survey Team

* Euro-VO

* Euro-VO ICE: International Cooperation Empowerment

* International Virtual Observatory Alliance

* SVMT: Survey Visualisation & Monitoring Tool

* VirGO: ESO visual archive browser

* ESO-VO Partner Organisations

 

Past projects

* EURO-VO AIDA Astronomical Infrastructure for Data Access (2008-2010)

* EURO-VO Data Centre Alliance (2006-2008)

* VOTECH: Virtual Observatory Technology(2005-2009)

* AVO: Astrophysical Virtual Observatory (Phase A Study, 2002-2005)

* AstroVirTel: Accessing Astronomical Archives as Virtual telescopes (ST-ECF & ESO, 2000-2003)