VIALACTEA knowledge base homogenizing access to Milky Way data

TL;DR

The paper presents the VIALACTEA Knowledge Base, a comprehensive infrastructure integrating various data resources, databases, and web services to facilitate access and discovery of Milky Way data for scientific research.

Contribution

It details the development and current status of VLKB, including data resources, metadata management, and user services for data discovery and access.

Findings

Integrated diverse Milky Way data resources.

Enabled efficient data discovery via VO-inspired metadata.

Provided user-friendly services for data exploration.

Abstract

The VIALACTEA project has a work package dedicated to Tools and Infrastructure and, inside it, a task for the Database and Virtual Observatory Infrastructure. This task aims at providing an infrastructure to store all the resources needed by the, more purposely, scientific work packages of the project itself. This infrastructure includes a combination of: storage facilities, relational databases and web services on top of them, and has taken, as a whole, the name of VIALACTEA Knowledge Base (VLKB). This contribution illustrates the current status of this VLKB. It details the set of data resources put together; describes the database that allows data discovery through VO inspired metadata maintenance; illustrates the discovery, cutout and access services built on top of the former two for the users to exploit the data content.