Derriere Sébastien

Abstract Reference: 31006
Identifier: P4.5
Presentation: Poster presentation
Key Theme: 4 Long-term Management of Data Archives

VOAlerts: VO-enabled data service discovery

Authors:
Derriere Sébastien, Boch Thomas, Loïc Gasiorowski

The number of astronomical data services is increasing at an accelerating pace, and it can be difficult for astronomers to cope with this data avalanche. With the Virtual Observatory project, new data services can be registered in a Registry, but astronomers still have to pull information from the Registry to discover newly published services. Moreover, in order to discover what data (images, catalogues, spectra) are available for their favorite sky target, astronomers have to query each service to see if they are relevant or not. We present a newly developed service dubbed VOAlerts to help astronomers discover relevant data services. The scientists simply subscribe to the service, and provide a list of sky targets they are interested in. VOAlerts takes care of monitoring the VO Registry for newly published services. For each new service, VOAlerts tests if it contains data around the followed targets, and sends summary notifications to the astronomer with details on how to retrieve the relevant data.