About GAVO

Background

The next generation astronomy data archives will cover most of the sky at high resolution and in all wavelengths, from radio to gamma rays. The ever-increasing amount of high-quality scientific data stored in such digital archives is becoming a "source" that can be utilized by research teams in a fashion similar to observing with a real "physical" telescope at a ground-based or space-borne observatory.

Community-wide access to such data - appropriately archived and documented - is obviously desirable. A connected and inter-operating set of astronomical archives can be viewed as an "Astrophysical Virtual Observatory" in which a "telescope" is represented by a network of facilities, whilst the "instrument" is the suite of software tools to query and analyze the data. Within such a construct, it will be possible to perform, for instance, "virtual surveys" of the real digitized sky.

The notion of a Virtual Observatory (VO) includes the concept of GRID-computation. Not only will the federated archives have a broad geographical distribution, but also the computer resources required to "mine" the data will most likely not be located at the site of the researcher, but at a different location, or even be distributed.

The project

The German Astrophysical Virtual Observatory (GAVO) is a project designed for building a platform to support modern astronomical research in Germany, thus becoming the German contribution to the international activities in creating a global Virtual Observatory (VO) network. GAVO was recommended as one of the highest priority projects in the Denkschrift Astronomie/Astrophysik 2001. <p> Several German astronomical institutes have partnered in order

  • to contribute their own data archives and relevant expertise,
  • to develop ideas and tools to store, manipulate, process, and exploit this collection of data archives, and
  • to act as primary contact points for all people interested in using the VO, ranging from professional scientists, to teachers and students at high-schools or universities, to amateur astronomers.

The development and construction of a VO will be a great challenge to astrophysicists, mathematicians, statisticians, and indeed specialists in all areas of computer science including software systems, information technology, and networks. Active cooperation with the relevant branches of universities, research institutes, and industry are both welcome and needed.

The GAVO activities will merge into the global VO network, currently being established by the international astronomical community. Within this context common standards for storage, dissemination, processing and visualization are being developed for the data products federated by the VOs.

GAVO's activities should also be interesting to other scientific disciplines, notably elementary particle physics and molecular biology, but also meteorology, geology, chemistry, and medicine - which share common problems in providing easy access to data, and in generating high quality scientific output from modern data sets with volumes surpassing the Terabyte regime.

Goal and objectives

GAVO's main goal is to effectively support science. The GAVO project team aims at providing fast and easy access to astronomical data archives and related documentation, as well as a capability to use highly sophisticated software tools for new studies.

The following objectives are envisaged in the long run:

  • GAVO will work towards achieving interoperability of heterogeneous, distributed data archives over high-bandwidth network links through a set of interface/infrastructure tools currently under development.
  • Participating astronomical institutes will establish co-operating expert data centers which provide key data archives, relevant documentation and some software tools, all within the GAVO-infrastructure.
  • Participating computer science institutes will establish high-bandwidth network links between the expert data centers, and may also develop tools for handling and analyzing massive amounts of data.
  • Participating university institutes will use the emerging GAVO-capabilities for teaching purposes, and may also provide gateways to schools and to the interested general public.