ESCAPE joined the International Virtual Observatory Alliance Interoperability Meeting

The International Virtual Observatory Alliance (IVOA), the organisation that debates and agrees the technical standards that are needed to make the Virtual Observatory possible, organized its Interoperability Meeting in Paris, France, from 12 to 17 May 2019. This was the first IVOA meeting to be held during the ESCAPE project. The vision of the Virtual Observatory (VO) is a collection of interoperating data archives, services and software tools that facilitate astronomical research.

This meeting represented an important step for ESCAPE as there is a high level of coherence between the direction of the international IVOA and needs of the ESCAPE partners.

One of ESCAPE’s main objectives is indeed to assess and implement the connection of the European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures (ESFRI) and other astronomy and astroparticle research infrastructures to the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) through the Virtual Observatory framework, actively contributing to the setting up of the EOSC services.

These ESCAPE project meetings that are associated with those of IVOA are being used to monitor the progress on the priorities for the development of standards relevant to the ESFRI projects and other research infrastructures participating in ESCAPE.