Mampaey, Benjamin ; Delouille, Veronique ; Vansintjan, Robbe

in press to Solar Physics (2025)

Abstract: The volume and diversity of solar physics data have grown exponentially in the last three decades. In view of making solar datasets easily accessible to the scientific community, we have developed the SOLARNET Virtual Observatory (SVO), an IT service that collects metadata from a large range of solar observational datasets in a common catalog to allow smooth data search and access. It follows the principle of virtual observatories (VO), with a provider layer, a core metadata database, and a user layer. The user layer contains a user friendly web application, Python and IDL libraries, as well as a RESTful API. The SVO allows searching the metadata across all datasets, or within a specific dataset using more precise search conditions. It also allows to search solar events from the HEK database and to find data that overlap with these events. Data can be previewed from the web application and downloaded. The Python and IDL libraries allow to integrate the SVO data search, and access, to complex data processing pipelines. On the provider side, datasets are ingested through tailored scripts. Recently, a TAP client layer has been added to the SVO, hence it is possible to populate the SVO automatically with a dataset available as a TAP or EPN-TAP service. We describe the service, user and provider side of the SVO, and illustrate its capabilities with four scientific use-cases.

Keyword(s): Data management ; Virtual observatories ; Open science ; FAIR principles ; Solar physics ; TAP client
DOI: 10.1007/s11207-025-02424-0
Funding: RT/23/SUNRISE