The SOLARNET Virtual Observatory: An Effective Way to Search Solar Datasets and Cross-Search with Solar Events

Abstract

The volume and diversity of solar physics data have grown exponentially in the last three decades. In view of making solar datasets easily accessible to the scientific community, we have developed the SOLARNET Virtual Observatory (SVO), an IT service that collects metadata from a large range of solar observational datasets in a common catalog to allow smooth data search and access. It follows the virtual observatories (VO) principle, with a provider layer, core metadata database, and user layer. The user layer contains a user-friendly web application, Python and IDL libraries, and a RESTful API. The SVO enables metadata to be searched either across all datasets or within a specific dataset by applying more precise search conditions. Additionally, it allows researchers to query solar events from the HEK database and identify data that overlaps with these events. Data can be previewed and downloaded from the web application. The Python and IDL libraries allow the integration of the SVO data search and functionality with complex data processing pipelines. On the provider side, datasets are ingested through tailored scripts. Recently, a TAP client layer has been added to the SVO, hence, it is possible to populate the SVO automatically with a dataset that is available as a TAP or EPN-TAP service. We describe the service, user, and provider side of the SVO and illustrate its capabilities with four scientific use cases.