4–9 Oct 2026
Europe/Dublin timezone

The Virtual Solar Observatory 2.0: Connecting Heliophysics Data, Metadata, Services, and Users

6 Oct 2026, 16:00
1h 30m
Poster DASH General Poster Session

Speaker

Alisdair Davey (National Solar Observatory)

Description

For more than two decades, the Virtual Solar Observatory has provided a common interface for discovering and accessing solar and heliophysics data held by distributed archives. VSO 2.0 is a major modernization of this service, replacing the original Perl- and SOAP-based system with a predominantly Python-based, REST-oriented architecture.

This poster presents an overview of VSO 2.0 and the capabilities being developed for researchers, data providers, and software clients. These include a revised data model, an expanded Registry describing available data holdings and provider capabilities, richer metadata services, reusable search presets, and updated programmatic and web-based interfaces.

We illustrate how the principal elements of VSO 2.0 connect users and software clients with distributed data providers, while maintaining a consistent approach to search and data access across heterogeneous archives. The poster will also describe the current status of the project and how the new architecture can support future instruments, datasets, metadata types, and community services.

Together, these developments are intended to make VSO easier to extend, more transparent to users and providers, and better able to support metadata-driven discovery across the solar and heliophysics data ecosystem

Author

Alisdair Davey (National Solar Observatory)

Co-authors

Dr Edward Mansky (ADNET Systems Inc.) Kaushal Patel (Columbus Technologies) Niles Oien (National Solar Observatory) Dr Jack Ireland (NASA/GSFC) Dr Andrew Inglis (Catholic University, NASA/GSFC) Jennifer Spencer (Columbus Technologies)

Presentation materials

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