Optical Spectroscopy with the Technology of Virtual Observatory

TL;DR

This paper reviews the current state and future needs of optical spectroscopy within the Virtual Observatory framework, aiming to efficiently handle and analyze massive astronomical spectral data sets.

Contribution

It provides an overview of VO spectroscopic capabilities and identifies future requirements for semi-automatic multi-wavelength spectral analysis.

Findings

Current VO spectroscopic capabilities are summarized.

Future requirements for large-scale spectral analysis are outlined.

Emphasis on semi-automatic multi-wavelength analysis methods.

Abstract

The contemporary astronomy is flooded with an exponentially growing petabyte-scaled data volumes produced by powerful ground and space-based instrumentation as well as a product of extensive computer simulations and computations of complex numerical models. The efficient organisation and seamless handling of this information avalanche stored in a world-wide spread heterogeneous databases and the facilitation of extraction of new physical knowledge about the Universe is a primary goal of the rapidly evolving astronomical Virtual Observatory (VO). We give an overview of current spectroscopic capabilities of VO and identify the future requirements indispensable for detailed multi-wavelength analysis of huge amounts of spectra in a semi-automatic manner.