3. What’s the VO

The VO is a set of standards that let clients discover and interrogate astronomical data services in a uniform manner. Standards include:

• Registry – describing and finding services
• VOTable, UCD – writing tables with rich metadata
• SAMP – connecting software components
• SCS, SIAP, SSAP – querying catalog, image, and spectral services
• TAP – running remote database queries
• Datalink – bundling up complex data and services
• MOC, HiPS – sky coverage and hierarchical imaging

The purpose of all this is so machines instead of humans can operate the services. With an average web page, that’s hard to impossible.

Machines operating services, in turn, are important to save manual work. This is part convenience, but mainly it’s so you can use more and diverse data for your research.

See the IVOA home page for more information.