The Virtual Solar Observatory concept

The continuing development of the Internet as a research tool has sparked new interest in the development of networked astronomical databases and analysis tools. In this paper, I outline a concept for a Virtual Solar Observatory (VSO), a set of data archives and analysis tools distributed in physical location at sites that already host such systems. The technical concepts of the VSO include federated distributed archiving, an adaptive metadata thesaurus, a single unified intuitive GUI, context-based searches, and distributed computing. Potential analysis tools include content-based searches, visual programming tools, and visualization packages. The development of a VSO would greatly facilitate solar physics research since a user would no longer need to have detailed knowledge of all solar archive sites.