Virtual Observatory links

Organizations, international/multinational
- IVOA (International Virtual Observatory Alliance)
- Euro-VO
  - DCA (Data Center Alliance)
  - VOTECH (Technology Centre)
  - Facility Centre (user support)
  - FP7 Euro-VO AIDA (Astronomical Infrastructure for Data Access)
Organizations, national (not complete list)
- (ca) Canadian Virtual Observatory (CVO)
- (de) German Astrophysical Virtual Observatory (GAVO)
- (es) Spanish Virtual Observatory (SVO)
- (in) Virtual Observatory India
- (uk) AstroGrid
- (us) US National Virtual Observatory (NVO)
See also the list of IVOA member organizations
Other groups working on VO (not complete list)
- ESO Virtual Observatory
Books, open access
- ASP-CS 382 (2007): The National Virtual Observatory: Tools and Techniques for Astronomical Research (eds. Graham, Fitzpatrick, McGlynn) (or this link)
Newsletters, etc.
- IVOA newsletter
- US NVO newsletter
Meetings (selected list)
- Astronomical Spectroscopy & The Virtual Observatory, ESAC/Madrid, March 2007
- EURO-VO DCA workshops on Theory in the VO and Grid in the VO, MPE/Garching, April 2008;
  presentations are available from the Agenda page;
  proceedings papers, all:
  - Memorie della Società Astronomica Italiana Vol. 80 n.2
  proceedings papers, selected:
  - Santander-Vela: The Virtual Observatory and Grid in Spain
- EURO-VO DCA workshop on how to publish data in the VO, ESO/Garching, June 2008;
  presentations are available from the Program page, selected presentations (PDF):
- US NVO summer school, Santa Fe, September 2008 (schedule)
- IVOA Interoperability Meeting, Baltimore, October 2008
More presentations, etc.
- IVOA list of Training Materials and Presentations
- Euro-VO Presentations
Papers (selected)
Refereed journals:
Other:
- Padovani (2006): The AVO to EURO-VO Transition (ASP-CS)
- Valentijn et al. (2007): Astro-WISE: Chaining to the Universe (ASP-CS)
- Andernach (2009): Safeguarding Old and New Journal Tables for the VO: Status for Extragalactic and Radio Data (Data Science Journal, in press)
- Vignali et al.: Multi-wavelength data handling in current and future surveys: the possible role of Virtual Observatory (to be published in the Proceedings of the Workshop "Multiwavelength Astronomy and Virtual Observatory", held at ESAC-Madrid, December 1-3, 2008)
- Tedds (2009): Science with the Virtual Observatory: the AstroGrid VO Desktop (to be published in the Proceedings of the Workshop "Multiwavelength Astronomy and Virtual Observatory", held at ESAC-Madrid, December 1-3, 2008)
- Santander-Vela et al. (2010): Data Provenance: Use Cases for the ESO archive, and Interactions with the Virtual Observatory (to appear in the Proceedings of the Astronomical Data Analysis Software and Systems XIX meeting)
- Fabbiano et al. (2010): Recommendations of the VAO-Science Council, see also http://www.aui.edu/vao.php
- D'Abrusco et al. (2010): Scientific requirements of the VAO SED tool
Software
- The AstroGrid Desktop Suite (see also install)
- Aladin Sky Atlas
- Saada (see also this DCA workshop page)
- VisIVO (Visualisation Interface to the Virtual Observatory)
- VOSpec
- VOPlot
- STIL (Starlink Tables Infrastructure Library)
- STILTS (STIL Tool Set)
- TOPCAT (Tool for OPerations on Catalogues And Tables)
- Starlink SPLAT-VO
- VirGO, related to Stellarium
- VO-CLI: Command Line Tools for the VO
- More aimed at the general public:
  - Google Sky (part of Google Earth); also web interface at google.com/sky
  - worldwidetelescope.org (software for Microsoft Windows only; website requires Flash)
- Lists of software/applications:
  - EURO-VO applications page
  - IVOA applications page
Online tools
Spectroscopy
- VOSpec Tool main page (requires java plugin)
- EZ - A VO Compliant Tool for Automatic Spectral Parameters Measurement (Fumana et al. 2008); EZ website
Standards, protocols, recommendations, etc.
- Simple Application Messaging Protocol (SAMP): messaging protocol that enables astronomy software tools to interoperate and communicate. SAMP will superseed PLASTIC (PLatform for AStronomical Tool InterConnection)
- Simple Cone Search: protocol for retrieving records from a catalog of astronomical sources
- Simple Image Access: protocol for retrieving image data from a variety of astronomical image repositories
- Simple Spectral Access: protocol to remotely discover and access one dimensional spectra
- SkyNode Interface: protocol to allow a client to make an ADQL query of the SkyNode database
- Astronomical Data Query Language (ADQL): an SQL-like language for searching astronomical tables etc.
- Unified Content Descriptors (UCDs): IVOA-controlled vocabulary for describing astronomical data quantities (see also this CDS/Vizier page)
- VOEvent: standard for representing transient celestial events; see also voeventnet.org
- VOResource: XML encoding schema for resource metadata
- VOSpace: IVOA interface to distributed storage
- VOTable: standard for tables containing data and metadata (see also Mark Taylor: VOTable: Why, What and How?)
See also IVOA Documents and Standards
Registries
- IVOA Registry of Registries
VO-related
- Astro-WISE (Astronomical Wide-field Imaging System for Europe)
- TERAPIX (Traitement Élémentaire, Réduction et Analyse des PIXels de megacam)
Illustrations of VO use
- Euro-VO Scientific Workflows
Misc.
- AVO prototype download (for AVO demo 2005?), see also this 2004 NEON archive school tutorial (both links found on Paolo Padovani's VO page)
- GAVO VO Day
Useful words not covered above
- Data model: ...
- Interoperability: the ability to interoperate
- Mashup: web application that combines data from more than one source into a single integrated tool (definition taken from Wikipedia)
- Metadata: data about data, description of data
- Provenance: origin, history (see also Wikipedia)
- Use case: ...
- utypes: pointers to specific data models (definition taken from Sébastien Derriere (CDS) - Metadata in the VO (UCDs, units, UTypes))
- Web service: interface used for application to application communication on the WWW (see Wikipedia and the voservices.org help page)
- Workflow: a sequence of VO-related tasks, possibly including loops, which can be saved in some format and then re-run (definition taken from the AstroGrid scripting page) (see also Wikipedia)
- XML schema: higher-level description of the structure and content of an XML document(?) (see also Wikipedia)
Mostly of historical interest
- On-line complement of the 1995 book Information & On-line Data in Astronomy
Urania (A)VO (currently in a category of its own)
- Urania VO
- Urania AVO

Other astronomy links

Literature
- ADS abstract service
- ArXiv, astro-ph, new submissions (DE mirror)
  - arxivsorter
- Journals
  - A&A
  - AJ
  - ApJ
  - MNRAS
  - PASP
Organizations
- IAU
- ESO
Data centres, etc.
- CDS
  - Simbad
- NED
Observing planning tools
Other online tools
- Ned Wright's Javascript Cosmology Calculator
GRB
Projects
Discussion fora
- cosmocoffee
Lists of astronomy resources on the web
- AstroWeb: Astronomy resources on the Internet (page at CDS)
Encyclopediae
- COSMOS - The SAO Encyclopedia of Astronomy
Software
- Goddard IDL Astronomy User's Library
- hyperz
Spectroscopy
Statistics
Public outreach
- Astronomy Picture of the Day
- International Year of Astronomy 2009
The public helping the astronomers - citizen science
- Galaxy Zoo
Images of astronomical objects useful for teaching, presentations, etc.
Misc./unsorted

Selected computing links

Programming and scripting languages
Editors
- Vim (vi improved); vim tips
E-Mail clients
- Mutt
LINUX
- LINUX distributions
  - CentOS (a Red Hat Enterprise Linux derivative)
  - Scientific Linux (a Red Hat Enterprise Linux derivative)
  - Debian
  - Ubuntu
  - Wikipedia pages: intro and comparison; DistroWatch
- Misc.
  - linuxquestions.org
  - Linux Raid (Linux software RAID)
GPU
Misc.
- VirtualBox; for what it's about, see the reviews, e.g. this one from Desktoplinux, this one from Linuxgazette or this one from Softpedia
- Billigt at redde en smadret harddisk

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Bo Milvang-Jensen 2008-2011. Page last updated: 25-Jan-2011