The VOTECH project is a €6.6M Design
Study under EU FP6 which aims at completing all technical
preparatory work necessary for the construction of the
European Virtual Observatory (Euro-VO). The concept of the
Virtual Observatory (VObs) is that all the world's data
should feel like it sits on the astronomer's desk top,
analysable with a user selected workbench of tools, made
available through a standard interface. Internationally this
is set to transform and re-structure the way astronomy is
done.
Euro-VO is a specifically
European implementation of this idea, and will produce a
world leading infrastructure providing a unified virtual
data resource and the ability to peform complex data
discovery and manipulation tasks across the whole range of
astronomy. Access to data and tools will be equally good
across Europe, regardless of location.
The VOTECH project will undertake feasibility studies and design work aimed
at integrating such new technologies into the Euro-VO. Key IT advances to build
on are in intelligent resource discovery (ontology and the semantic web), data
mining, and visualisation capabilities. These will be integrated via global
astronomical interoperability standards coupled with the latest distributed grid
computing services. Additionally this project covers design and preparatory work
to ensure that data from the major European telescopes and facilities (as
represented by the Opticon and RadioNet networks) is fully accessible through
the Euro-VO, and where required, is able to offload mass scale computational
process onto the EGEE backbone.
In summary, VOTECH will lay the technical foundations of the Euro-VO, a
European infrastructure to revolutionise the scientific process
for astronomers.
