NVO Summary

I bookmarked several NVO related links on del.icio.us. See my tag role on this blog, or check http://del.icio.us/marlon_pierce. This blog post is intended to tie these together.

It looks like the Grid Summer Schools in 2004 and 2006 are the best sources for software. Ray Plante's nice but somewhat outdated summary, http://us-vo.org/pubs/files/PublishHowTo.html, is the best primer.

In general, it looks like one needs to do the following:

• Get some data.
• Set up a registry. NCSA's VORegistry-in-a-box looks like the best available software. They also interestingly seem to build on the Digital Library's OAI software.
• Set up some data services. The simplest is a Cone Search service. This is available from the 2004 Summer School. This uses HTTP GET/URLS/REST, and apparently returns a list of links to existing whole images in the archive.
  
• The SAIP service (aka SAI service) seems to be also available in the 2004 download. This implements the Simple Image Access Protocol. The services are typically HTTP GET/REST based but support more arguments that the Cone Service. For example, you can request image cutouts and other things that are created and returned on the fly, not just whole images.
  
• The OpenSkyNode service is yet another service interface. This looks like it supports more complicated, SQL-like queries and can query multiple servers. But the JSkyNode software that Ray Plante mentions is no longer available.

For actually building the database, Roy Williams suggested http://amwdb.u-strasbg.fr/saada/.