Approaches to Federation of Astronomical Data

Abstract

We discuss some approaches to rich semantic interoperation of web-based services, so that a user of the Virtual Observatory can create a distributed network of services to read data from archive, calibrate it, compute with it, fuse it to their data, estimate query execution cost, and many others. Each of these services can be maintained by dierent people and connected by standard protocols. We point out the need for interoperating the FITS and XML ways of representing structured information, and the need for standard semantics and representation of generic data objects. We consider Capability documents as a way to interoperate remote services, as well as concrete implementations of these from the the geography and business communities.

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