What is the National Virtual Observatory (NVO)?
As conceived by the National Academy of Science in its 2001 Decaldal survey, the NVO will link the archival data sets of space- and ground-based observatories, the catalogs of multi-wavelength surveys, and the computational resources necessary to support comparison and cross-correlation among these resources. To the astronomer and the public, the NVO will be a seamless digital sky of current and future multiwavelength and simulated data sets, capable of being “observed” through queries that result in data or data about data (metadata). The NVO will also provide tools for analysis, visualization and object classification, and provide a framework with standards for archiving future astronomical data sets. A more global name for the NVO is the Virtual Observatory (VO) since it allows for interconnection with parallel efforts now underway internationally (e.g., the European AVO, AstroGRID and AstroVirtel projects).
