UC AWOB RM 06 VO Support

MPDL,GAVO

Virtual Observatory and AWOB
We want to allow AWOB users to interacts with "the Virtual Observatory". Here we start listing some functionalities that should illustrate what we mean with that:

TBD add links where appropriate ...

What is the "Virtual Observatory" ?
TBD

links:
 * IVOA: International Virtual Observatory Alliance
 * GAVO: German Astrophysical Virtual Observatory
 * more ...

AWOB as VO client
We want to allow users to make use of various VO services, i.e. AWOB should act as a client to the VO.

A typical VO interaction (here aimed at discovering images in remote image archives) could go as follows:
 * Service discovery
 * Connect to an IVOA compliant registry
 * Query the registry for (e.g.) data access layer (DAL) services of the desired kind (here e.g. SIA services for accessing image archives)
 * select one or more services.
 * Data discovery
 * formulate a query appropriate for the service type to discover data products that may be of interest (for SIA a position plus size of field-of-interest)
 * send the query to all selected services
 * retrieve results from the services listing data products corresponding to the query parameters (here VOTables containing SIA specific metadata, including an "AccessURL" that allows a direct download of the corresponding data produyct (here a FITS file))
 * select one or more data products
 * Data retrieval
 * Retrieve the data products using the simple accessURL-s.

Where can AWOB help here.
 * Query/browsing interface to IVOA Registry/-ies.
 * Data discovery interface for most important DAL services.
 * Query interface allowing definition and submission of queries.
 * Query result browsing interface (user friendly way to show the VOTable-s resulting from the queries)
 * Storage of history of queries, including possibly storing DAL queryDaya results in relational database.
 * Retrieval of data products. This can go in various ways.
 * First of all a VOTable row showing metadata about remote data product is a (remote) resource in its own right. It can be annotated, commented on etc., even without downloading the actual result.
 * To comment on/annotate the corresponsing data product, it must likely be possible to download it and/or at least show it in a visualisation tool such as Aladin.
 * We may want to allow local storage (i.e. in AWOB), but we could not require that.

AWOB as VO service provider
We want to allow users to publish their results through VO standards (where apporpriate). For example:
 * Images can be published through Simple Image Access Protocol (SIAP) or ObsTAP.
 * Spectracan be published through Simple SpectralAccess Protocol (SsAP) or ObsTAP.
 * Source catalogues can be published through Simple Cone Serach (SCS) or TAP.
 * Tables in relational database (see ) can be published through TAP.

Important here is the capture of appropriate metadata.