Lessons learnt in building VO resources: binding together several VO standards into an operational service

TL;DR

Building Virtual Observatory resources using IVOA standards is straightforward technically, but managing project scope and timelines requires careful planning due to hidden complexities.

Contribution

This paper shares practical lessons from implementing VO resources, highlighting the hidden challenges and providing real-world examples of successful standards integration.

Findings

VO standards enable advanced VO-enabled archives

Project timelines often underestimated due to hidden complexities

Successful VO resources require careful project management

Abstract

The International Virtual Observatory Alliance (IVOA) developed numerous interoperability standards during the last several years. Most of them are quite simple to implement from the technical point of view and even contain "SIMPLE" in the title. Does it mean that it is also simple to build a working VO resource using those standards? Yes and no. "Yes" because the standards are indeed simple, and "no" because usually one needs to implement a lot more than it was thought in the beginning of the project so the time management of the team becomes difficult. In our presentation we will start with a basic case of a simple spectral data collection. Then we will describe several examples of small" technologically advanced VO resources built in CDS and VO-Paris and will show that many standards are hidden from managers' eyes at the initial stage of the project development. The projects will be: (1) the GalMer database providing access to the results of numerical simulations of galaxy interactions; (2) the full spectrum fitting service that allows one to extract internal kinematics and stellar populations from spectra of galaxies available in the VO. We conclude that: (a) with the existing set of IVOA standards one can already build very advanced VO-enabled archives and tools useful for scientists; (b) managers have to be very careful when estimating the project development timelines for VO-enabled resources.