We have used semantic technologies to design, implement, and deploy an interdisciplinary virtual observatory. The Virtual Solar-Terrestrial Observatory is a production data framework providing access to observational datasets. It is in use by a community of scientists, students, and data providers interested in the middle and upper Earth's atmosphere, and the Sun. The data sets span upper atmospheric terrestrial physics to solar physics. The observatory allows virtual access to a highly distributed and heterogeneous set of data that appears as if all resources are organized, stored and accessible from a local machine. The system has been operational since the summer of 2006 and has shown registered data access by over 75% of the active community (last count over 600 of the estimated 800 person active research community). This demonstration will highlight how semantic technologies are being used to support data integration and more efficient data access in a multi-disciplinary setting. A full paper on this work is being published in the IAAI 07 'deployed' paper track.
['Deborah L. McGuinness', 'Peter A. Fox', 'L. Cinquini', 'Patrick West', 'Jose Garcia', 'J. L. Benedict', 'Don Middleton']
A deployed semantically-enabled interdisciplinary virtual observatory