Current GAVO Projects
The important projects that GAVO is currently working on are listed below. Some projects are about defining or communicating standards. Others are VO software products that unlike our [Products.|stable services] are still under development or not yet stable for public release. More projects are described in our smaller projects page.
IVOA standards
GAVO is actively involved in the efforts of the International Virtual Observatory Alliance (IVOA). The IVOA has as its mission to "facilitate the international coordination and collaboration necessary for the development and deployment of the tools, systems and organizational structures necessary to enable the international utilization of astronomical archives as an integrated and interoperating virtual observatory." GAVO is following and contributing to this process in various ways. For example we have created implementations of proposed standards around data sets provided by participating institutes. For examples follow the Services link on the left menu bar. We are also active in the development of new standards, in particular the standard for a query language (VOQL/ADQL) and standards for theoretical data products and services.
Theory in the Virtual Observatory
While most VO efforts are concentrating on observational archives, GAVO is especially interested in the theoretical component. This comprises the publication of theoretical datasets in similar ways as their observational counterparts as well as the creation of services with a more theoretical flavor. The ultimate goal is to create an environment in which, on one hand, theoretical results can be used for the interpretation of observations, and on the other hand, observations can be used to constrain theoretical models.
GAVO has been working on a number of concrete theory projects, producing "virtual telescopes", a relational database storing results of a large cosmological simulation (the Millennium simulation) and a service publishing theoretical spectra (TMAP).
GAVO is furthermore actively involved in the IVOA theory interest group, which aims at channeling the requirements from the theory community into the IVOA standards process. A current active effort there is the development of data access protocol for simulations, similar to the obervational access protocols for source catalogues, images and spectra.
The GAVO Data Center
GAVO is establishing a Data Center to store, organize, and publish astronomical data (in particular from the German community) in VO compliant ways. Astronomers interested in contributing data are requested to contact gavo@ari.uni-heidelberg.de.
The Data Center is meant to complement existing sites like CDS in that while it processes catalogue-like data, its focus should be on data products like spectra, images, time series, or simulation results. Also, we allow restricted access to stored data, or offer "partial curation" models where the data provider still controls the data, while we publish the pertinent metadata.
Our software can be used to build local, "private" data centers; please inquire about code access.
Tools for the Analysis of Stars and Nebulae
We will provide synthetic spectra to the Virtual Observatory, based on simulation software for the calculation of NLTE model atmospheres, as well as necessary atomic data. This will enable a VO user to directly compare observation and model-atmosphere spectra on three levels: The easiest and fastest way is the use of our pre-calculated flux-table grid in which one may inter- and extrapolate. For a more precise analysis of an abservation, the VO user may improve the fit to the observation by the calculation of individual model atmospheres with fine-tuned photospheric parameters via the WWW interface TMAW. The more experienced VO user may create own atomic-data files for a more detailed analysis and calculate model atmosphere and flux tables with these.
Rave Survey
RAVE, the RAdial Velocity Experiment, is a survey that will provide the radial velocity data of a million stars of the southern-hemisphere until 2010 (http://www.rave-survey.aip.de). It collects medium resolution spectra in the CA-triplet region for southern-hemisphere stars in the magnitude range 9-12.
As a product of GAVO-II the database currently returns the radial velocity and photometric measurements of 25,000 stars of first data release using VO standard search methods like cone search, as well as many other options. The work currently ongoing to be finished until Mid-2008 includes a number of improvements to the RAVE query interface, the option to search and retrieval of the observed spectra using the IVOA spectral data model, as well as full VO compliance for URL string definition and registry protocols.