Virtual Observatory

contact: M. Molinaro

IA2 provides support for the publication of astrophysical data and resources in the VO. To fulfill this task its staff designed and developed applications and publishing solutions conforming the IVOA standards.
Applications developed at IA2 include

• the web application VO-Dance for publishing services dealing with images, spectra, and catalogs (currently under revision to build a new service publishing environment);
• its counterpart IA2TAP dedicated to deploy on the web generic tabular data sets;
• Connected to the deployment of TAP services also an administration interface to the TAP_SCHEMA has been developed, this TAP_SCHEMA Manager helps the user filling and maintaining the metadata of the TAP services build using IA2TAP.
• the web application VAPE (VO Aided Publishing for Education), leaning on VO-Dance, to generate service dedicated to educational and amateur astronomers, with an additional emphasis on the simplicity while building the service configuration. 

With the help of these applications data from projects like TNG, Planck, WINGS, VIPERS and others have been made available to the VO community. Here you can find some basic information on these IA2 maintained VO resources.

A couple of smaller auxiliary tools can be found in the IA2 software list. Among them a REST-based wrapper for the CDS UCD tools and a NameResolver library to query the CDS Sesame objects name resolver are used, in combination with the TapSchemaManager, are used as components to the APOGEO portal generator.

The VO efforts of IA2 fall within VObs.it, project that is the Italian contribution to the IVOA (International Virtual Observatory Alliance) and Euro-VO (European coordination of VO national projects, currently folded into the H2020 ASTERICS DADI Work Package). VO knowledge has been used by IA2 in projects like VIALACTEA and GENIUS.