MPS Seminar: The VO And Why It Matters To You (M. Demleitner)

In the most technical words, the Virtual Observatory (VO) is an effort to enable uniform and efficient access to astronomical data by creating an agreement between the data providers on how to provide services and data: In other words, writing standards. With more glitz, it is like the Web ("any browser opens any web page") and Google ("anything out there can be found"), only for data. In this talk I will try to convince you that what may sound incredibly tedious and boring in reality is exciting and useful to your research. Thus, after some motivation filling in the gaps in the above definitions, I will go on describing some of the key VO technologies and the ways to use them. I will close pointing out why
you should also publish to the VO and that that probably is not hard.