FROM DIGITAL DATA COLLECTIONS TO SEMANTIC VIRTUAL OBSERVATORIES: THE VSTO EXPERIENCE

The Virtual Solar-Terrestrial Observatory provides the next generation of online access to observational datasets from fields spanning upper atmospheric terrestrial physics to solar physics. The system semantically enables virtual access to a highly distributed and heterogeneous set of data. The resulting system appears to the end user as if all resources are organized, stored and retrieved using a single schema and vocabulary. VSTO has now been deployed for over a year and has an end-user community comprising scientists, students, and data providers. We present details on the case study, our technological approach including the semantic web languages, tools and infrastructure deployed, and the benefits of semantic technology to the application community.