Virtual Observatory Systems Department (VOS)

The Virtual Observatory Systems Department (VOS) of the ESO Data Management and Operations Division is based in Garching bei München, Germany. Its main mission is to make the Science Archive Facility (SAF) into a powerful scientific resource for the ESO community and coordinate ESO’s involvement in Virtual Observatory (VO) activities, building on the success of the AstroVirtel and Astrophysical Virtual Observatory projects. VOS was created on Nov. 1, 2004. At present it includes the Advanced Data Products (ADP) and Virtual Observatory Technology (VOT) groups.

Specific tasks include:

creation of Advanced Data Products (ADP), i.e. highly processed ESO data products, ready for immediate scientific use;
ingestion of ADP into a VO-compliant SAF; these will either be produced by the ADP group or by the community. Note that as of Period 75, Principal Investigators of ESO Large Programs are required to return their data products to the ESO archive at the time of publication of their scientific results (see the latest Call for Proposals);
publication of ADP within the VO infrastructure;
science-oriented archive interface;
develop VO technology, standards, and tools for the ESO SAF, also via participation to European VO activities (euro-vo.org), in particular through the VO-TECH project (eurovotech.org);
hosting of the Euro-VO Facility Centre.

ADP Workflow

The Virtual Observatory Systems Department is headed by Paolo Padovani. Piero Rosati leads the ADP group, which includes Nausicaa Delmotte, Jörg Retzlaff, Charles Rite and Remco Slijkhuis while Markus Dolensky leads the VOT group, which at present includes Fabien Chéreau, Paul Harrison, Jean-Christophe Malapert and Bruno Rino. Andreas Wicenec provides his expertise to both groups, while Evanthia Hatziminaoglou is the Euro-VO Facility Centre astronomer and María del Mar Sierra is Technical Support Engineer of the Euro-VO Data Centre Alliance.

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