Markus Dolensky

The Simple Spectral Access protocol

The goal of the Simple Spectral Access (SSA) specification is to define a uniform interface to spectral data including spectral energy distributions (SEDs), 1D spectra, and time series data. In contrast to 2D images, spectra are stored in a wide variety of formats and there is no widely used standard in astronomy for representing spectral data, hence part of the challenge of specifying SSA was defining a general spectrophotometric data model as well as definitions of standard serializations in a variety of data formats including XML and FITS. Access is provided to both atlas (pre-computed) data and to virtual data which is computed on demand. The term simple in Simple Spectrum Access refers to the design goal of simplicity in both implementing spectral data services and in retrieving spectroscopic data from distributed data collections. SSA is a product of the data access layer (DAL) working group of the International Virtual Observatory Alliance (IVOA). The requirements were derived from a survey among spectral data providers and data consumers and were further refined in a broad discussion in meetings and electronic forums as well as by prototyping efforts within the European Astrophysical Virtual Observatory (AVO) and the US National Virtual Observatory (NVO).

VOFilter: Bridging Virtual Observatory and Industrial Office Applications

VOFilter is an XML based filter developed by the Chinese Virtual Observatory project to transform tabular data files from VOTable format into OpenDocument format. VOTable is an XML format defined for the exchange of tabular data in the context of the Virtual Observatory (VO). It is the first Proposed Recommendation defined by International Virtual Observatory Alliance, and has obtained wide support from both the VO community and many Astronomy projects. OpenOffice.org is a mature, open source, and front office application suite with the advantage of native support of industrial standard OpenDocument XML file format. Using the VOFilter, VOTable files can be loaded in OpenOffice.org Calc, a spreadsheet application, and then displayed and analyzed as other spreadsheet files. Here, the VOFilter acts as a connector, bridging the coming VO with current industrial office applications. We introduce Virtual Observatory and technical background of the VOFilter. Its workflow, installation and usage are presented. Existing problems and limitations are also discussed together with the future development plans.

Virtual observatory standards in action

Interoperability in Virtual Observatories is based on standards for interchange formats, and protocols. Using real science cases, we present example VO tools based on the AVO prototypes and the CDS services, which implement the new and emerging VO standards. We discuss how these standards, such as VOTable, UCDs and data models enable interoperability between software components, and provide efficient and flexible means for data access. We show how UCDs are used in catalogue filtering and selection of relevant columns. We also demonstrate a simple yet powerful method for accessing data from image archives, customized data sets and local data within a single environment.