{"dataset":{"slug":"virtual-observatory-open-science","title":"Virtual Observatory & Open Science","description":"The Virtual Observatory interoperability framework and the access protocols that make the world's archives searchable as one (TAP, Cone Search, SIA, SSA), plus the open-science practices — pipelines, cross-matching, the ADS, persistent identifiers, and FAIR reproducibility.","version":"1.0.0","lastGenerated":"2026-06-29","license":"CC BY-SA 4.0","entityCount":10,"sources":["nasa"]},"entities":[{"id":"vo_protocol:cone-search","name":"Cone Search","type":"vo_protocol","domain":"science","description":"The simplest Virtual Observatory query — 'give me every object within this radius of this position' — a standard that any catalogue service can answer, used constantly to find what is known around a point on the sky.","entryPath":"/data-archives/cone-search"},{"id":"open_science_practice:cross-matching","name":"Cross-Matching","type":"open_science_practice","domain":"science","description":"Identifying the same object across different catalogues and wavelengths — matching a source in an infrared survey to its optical and X-ray counterparts — so that all that is known about an object can be brought together despite different names and positions.","entryPath":"/data-archives/cross-matching"},{"id":"open_science_practice:data-pipelines-and-calibration","name":"Data Pipelines & Calibration","type":"open_science_practice","domain":"science","description":"The automated processing that turns raw telescope readouts into calibrated, science-ready data — removing instrument signatures, correcting for the atmosphere or detector, and attaching the metadata and error estimates that make the data usable by anyone.","entryPath":"/data-archives/data-pipelines-and-calibration"},{"id":"open_science_practice:persistent-identifiers","name":"Persistent Identifiers","type":"open_science_practice","domain":"science","description":"The stable, unique names that make science findable and creditable — DOIs for datasets and papers, ORCID iDs for researchers, and bibcodes for the literature — so a result can be cited, retrieved, and attributed unambiguously years later.","entryPath":"/data-archives/persistent-identifiers"},{"id":"open_science_practice:reproducibility-and-fair","name":"Reproducibility & FAIR Data","type":"open_science_practice","domain":"science","description":"The principles that make science trustworthy and reusable — data that is Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable (FAIR), open archives, documented pipelines, and citable datasets — so that a result can be checked and built upon by anyone.","entryPath":"/data-archives/reproducibility-and-fair"},{"id":"vo_protocol:simple-image-access","name":"Simple Image Access","type":"vo_protocol","domain":"science","description":"A Virtual Observatory protocol for finding and retrieving images of a region of sky from an archive, regardless of which telescope took them — the image counterpart of the cone search.","entryPath":"/data-archives/simple-image-access"},{"id":"vo_protocol:simple-spectral-access","name":"Simple Spectral Access","type":"vo_protocol","domain":"science","description":"A Virtual Observatory protocol for finding and retrieving spectra of a target from an archive, bringing the spectroscopy of many instruments into a single uniform search.","entryPath":"/data-archives/simple-spectral-access"},{"id":"vo_protocol:table-access-protocol","name":"Table Access Protocol","type":"vo_protocol","domain":"science","description":"A Virtual Observatory protocol for running database queries against an archive's catalogues over the web, returning the results as VOTables — the standard way to ask an archive a precise question about its tables.","entryPath":"/data-archives/table-access-protocol"},{"id":"open_science_practice:the-ads-literature-service","name":"The ADS Literature Service","type":"open_science_practice","domain":"science","description":"NASA's Astrophysics Data System, the digital library of astronomy — indexing essentially the entire research literature and linking every paper to the data, catalogues, and objects it uses, so the literature and the data are one connected web.","entryPath":"/data-archives/the-ads-literature-service"},{"id":"vo_framework:the-virtual-observatory","name":"The Virtual Observatory","type":"vo_framework","domain":"science","description":"The framework of standards, coordinated by the International Virtual Observatory Alliance, that lets the world's archives be searched and combined as if they were one — so an astronomer can query every telescope's data at once. TAP, Cone Search, VOEvent, and VOTable are among its standards.","entryPath":"/data-archives/the-virtual-observatory"}]}