Current Status of the Japanese Virtual Observatory Portal

Shirasaki, Yuji

The Japanese Virtual Observatory (JVO) portal (http://jvo.nao.ac.jp/portal/) is a web portal for accessing astronomical data and analysis system throughthe Internet.

In 2009 and 2010, we developed two new data access interfaces: JVOSky and command-line access interfaces.

JVOSky is an on-line data discovery service which displays on the Google sky the coverage of observations made by various instruments. Using this interface, a user can graphically find sky regions where data of multi-wavelength observations exist.

Although a graphical user interface (GUI) is a convenient way for performing a simple query, it is not efficient nor flexible for performing a lot of queries by changing query parameters. Such a situation happens when a user wants to get a large number of data that may exceed the maximum number that a data service can return. We, therefore, have implemented a command line search interface that is accessible through typing commands on the user's computer.

JVO has a huge astronomical database called Digital Universe, which contains the coordinates and the photometric information of celestial objects collected from major survey catalogs. Currently we provide a functionality to search for data based on the coordinates only. However, there would be a science use case where a user wants to search based on SED properties. In order to provide this kind of searching functionality, cross identification among difference catalogs should be performed in advance. A search could be conducted against the whole sky, and all the data should be scanned in a reasonable time scale. To achieve such a functionality we are now developing a distributed data search system by means of the Hadoop.

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