  Since its inception in the early 2000, the Virtual Observatory (VO),
developed as a collaboration of many national and international projects, has
become a major factor in the discovery and dissemination of astronomical
information worldwide. The IVOA has been coordinating all these efforts
worldwide to ensure a common VO framework that enables transparent access to
and interoperability of astronomy resources (data and software) around the
world. The VO is not a magic solution to all astronomy data management
challenges but it does bring useful solutions in many areas borne out by the
fact that VO interfaces are broadly found in astronomy major data centres and
projects worldwide. Astronomy data centres have been building VO services on
top of their existing data services to increase interoperability with other
VO-compliant data resources to take advantage of the continuous and increasing
development of VO applications. VO applications have made multi-instrument and
multi-wavelength science, a difficult and fruitful part of astronomy, somewhat
easier. More recently, several major new astronomy projects have been directly
adopting VO standards to build their data management infrastructure, giving
birth to VO built-in archives. Embracing the VO framework from the beginning
brings the double gain of not needing to reinvent the wheel and ensuring from
the start interoperability with other astronomy VO resources. Some of the IVOA
standards are also starting to be used by neighbour disciplines like planetary
sciences. There is still quite a lot to be done on the VO, in particular
tackling the upcoming big data challenge and how to find interoperable
solutions to the new data analysis paradigm of bringing and running the
software close to the data.

Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics