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Paper: VOExplorer: Visualizing Data Discovery in the Virtual Observatory
Volume: 394, Astronomical Data Analysis Software and Systems (ADASS) XVII
Page: 159
Authors: Tedds, J.A.; Winstanley, N.; Lawrence, A.; Walton, N.; Auden, E.; Dalla, S.
Abstract: The UK AstroGrid project has developed the VOExplorer interface to the VO as part of its forthcoming Desktop suite of applications. VO-Explorer offers a powerful data-centric visualisation for browsing and filtering the entire VO registry using an iTunes type interface. We demonstrate how this allows the user to bookmark their own personalised lists of resources and to run tasks on the selected resources as desired. Thus VOExplorer significantly simplifies returning relevant data to queries such as “find me all extended X-ray sources in the 2XMM catalog”, and then export to a new catalogue or “find me all optical, near-IR and X-ray catalogued objects within 0.1 arcmins of a new transient Gamma Ray Burst (GRB) event” and now even “find me all transient events from e.g. GCN, IAU alerts previously recorded for this search radius”. HelioScope similarly searches solar archives within a given time interval. We demonstrate how the user is then offered the opportunity to process and act on those data sets. For this purpose a range of data visualisation and analytical tools are now available to pass data into and between directly. These include TopCat for catalogues, Aladin and Gaia for images, SPLAT and VOSpec for spectra or a simple ADQL query interface for more advanced use cases.
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