The VO vision

The vision of the Virtual Observatory (VO) is to make access to astronomical databases as seamless and transparent as browsing the World Wide Web is today. The data flowing from facilities and surveys is becoming standardised, compatible, and easy to examine jointly. Data centres provide not just data access, but data manipulation tools. These too will be standardised and compatible so that astronomers can mix and match different tools. Finally, data centres increasingly provide computational resources - data storage, search engines, analysis engines, and virtual user storage space - which are also becoming internationally standardised. The result should be an enormous increase in astronomical productivity. As each astronomer sits down at her PC, the world’s data, and all the tools necessary to analyse it, will be at her fingertips.

Topics

• Introductory Review
• Results and prospects from Sky Survey programmes
• Cosmology
• Quasars and Galaxy Formation
• VO technical advances and Data Mining Algorithms
• The Sun-Earth connection
• Large scale facilities and data management
• Galactic Structure and extreme stellar populations
• The VO worldwide
• Solar system science
• The VO and outreach
• The future of the VO
• Technology Demonstrations

• IAU General Assembly
• VO projects