The SOLARNET Virtual Observatory (SVO) has been developed into an operational system and multiple solar physics datasets have been made accessible and searchable through it, ready to be used by the solar community at large.
The Solarnet Virtual Observatory web interface, accessible at https://solarnet.oma.be upon registration.
The SOLARNET Virtual Observatory (SVO) was first developed into a prototype version in the FP7 SOLARNET project and further developed into an operational system in the H2020 SOLARNET project.
One of the aims of both projects was to bring together high-resolution solar physics data. These data often come from ground-based solar telescopes that cannot take measurements continuously but do so during observing campaigns, unlike data gathered by instruments onboard satellites which can make observations more or less continuously.
Keeping this in mind, the SVO was designed to work like a discovery machine, where researchers could not only search for the specific data or event that they are interested in but also search across multiple datasets so they can easily “discover” other data that they did not immediately think of but will help them in their research.
At the heart of the SVO is a meta-data database containing the meta-data from solar datasets taken both by space-borne and ground-based instruments. This lets users search across multiple datasets, by observation date, wavelength, tags and telescope, but also make more in depth queries on the meta-data of an individual dataset. The database can be queried through a web interface, an IDL client, and a Python client. Other tools can be interfaced with the database through the RESTful API. In addition, the Heliophysics Event Database (HEK) has also been integrated into the SVO and lets you search for data that overlaps with events from the HEK.
The SVO web interface (shown in the accompanying figure) makes it possible to see quick look images of data searches if the images are available and allows you to download the selected data through an FTP link which can be easily shared with colleagues.
Already quite some solar datasets are fully or partially available through the SVO, some through the EPN-TAB protocol, and work is being done to add more. Please have a look at the SVO website (https://solarnet.oma.be) and share and bookmark it if you like what you see. This work has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 824135.