The Semantic Web and ontologies are emerging technologies that enable advanced knowledge management and sharing. Their application to Astronomy can offer new ways of sharing information between astronomers, but also between machines or software components and allow inference engines to perform reasoning on an astronomical knowledge base. The first examples of astronomy-related ontologies are being developed in the european VOTech project.

A Virtual Observatory (VO) seeks to provide access to very large volumes of astronomical data over the internet to every interested user, along with software for the data anlysis, and tools for data visualisation, statistics and any other applications which are necessary for mining science from the data. Handling large volumes of data requires extensive computer resources, which may not be available to the end user; transferring data from the data centre to the user needs high bandwidth, which also may not be available. A VO therefore seeks to provide computing resources as well, which could be spread over a grid. The user can locate data of interest through registries, then access the data and analyse it using the computing resources, all through simple user interfaces.

Over the last few years there has been considerable progress in linking the published scholarly literature with on-line data. This will greatly help with data discovery and aid the efforts to the VO.

Astrophysical Integrated Research Environment (AIRE), aims to integrate astrophysical data, analysis software and astrophysical knowledge into an easy-to-use Internet based environment. Therefore, astrophysicists from different institutes can constitute virtual research groups which are favorable to study some complex multi-band astrophysical phenomena. The AIRE was put into use in Center for Astrophysics, Tsinghua university in 2003. Up to now, there are 219 advanced users in this environment. Several astrophysical researches base on AIRE have generated some important published results.

The Astro-Wise consortium has designed a new paradigm, ‘Awe‘, and implemented a fully scalable and distributed information system to overcome the huge information avalanche in wide-field astronomical imaging Surveys.

The products of optical wide-field survey are very valuable for their own purposes like the studies of large scale structure of galaxies, evolution of galaxies, Galactic structure and so on. At the same time optical view of sky will provide basic reference for the observation at other wavelength ranges. For this reason Palomar all sky survey has been used for various astronomical studies over 50 years. Now in the era of electronic devices, digital archives, and powerful computer systems, modern observation will replace the Palomar all sky survey.

We have developed a neural network based technique for identifying quasars from the photometric database of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). We have queried the SDSS data release 5 (DR5) to produce a dataset of spectroscopically identified samples of unresolved objects consisting of quasars and stars which forms the training set.

VLA A-array snapshots were obtained of a complete sample of steep-spectrum radio sources from the Texas Radio Interferometer survey. Though similar in sensitivity to the FIRST Survey, our A-array snapshots have better resolution, and are complementary to FIRST. All initial A-array maps are made, and we are comparing them to FIRST.

We present an analysis of the near-IR properties of galaxies and quasars detected in the mid-IR by the Spitzer Space Telescope. Using optical photometry from the Wide Field Survey and near-IR fluxes from the First Data Release of the UKIDSS (Dye et al. 2006) survey we carry out a preliminary characterization of the surface density of different samples of galaxies and their clustering properties.

The Virtual Solar Observatory (VSO) is a lightweight web service unifying twelve major solar data archives. With the VSO, users can simultaneously search for data from 50 space- and ground-based instruments covering the time period from 1915 to the present.

The Virtual Solar Observatory (VSO) concept outlines a software environment for searching, obtaining and analyzing data from archives of solar data that are distributed at many different observatories around the world (Hill 2006, in this volume). The VSO, however, not only provides fast and reliable access to the existing data of Solar Active Regions, but also represents a powerful and unique tool to perform numerical simulations of the evolution and present state of solar phenomena. Two centers at UNAM, the Institute of Astronomy (IA) and the Supercomputer Center (DGSCA), along with the Sonora University, are working together to create the Mexican Virtual Solar Observatory (MVSO) that will be part of a wider national effort.

We use the workflow capabilities of the AstroGrid Virtual Observatory system (<http://www.astrogrid.org>) to analyse the relation between flare productivity and location of Active Region (AR) emergence on the Sun. Specifically, we investigate whether emergence of a new region near existing ones results in increased productivity of the new and/or pre-existing AR. To address this question, we build a series of workflows that perform queries to catalogues of regions and flares, and operations on the results of the queries. There is a strong East-West asymmetry in the location of emergence of new regions. We do not find a significant difference between the flaring rate of paired and isolated regions, when we choose a value of 12° as the cutoff between the two populations.

The improvement of the dynamical models of solar system bodies’ motions will be very useful for the future space astrometry mission Gaia for a fast identification of objects, to discriminate between the well-known objects and the new ones. ‘Observations in the Past’ with plate archives allow realising it.

Numerous new Solar System objects, mainly asteroids, are still detected nowadays but their physical and dynamical characteristics remain not accurately determined, until dedicated observations and analysis are made. However, the Virtual Observatory is a perfect framework to search for this characterization by data mining. We are developing two studies for this goal by exploring the DENIS infrared and DFBS spectroscopic surveys. In order to scan the survey catalogues and to search for Solar System objects, we have developed a VO compliant workflow founded on the use of a recent VO tool labelled SkyBoT (Sky Bodies Tracker) (Berthier et al. 2005) and on the VizieR service provided by CDS. A public version of SkyBoT is implemented in the sky atlas Aladin since January 2006. It allows us to quickly get the precise coordinates of the asteroids, planets and natural satellites in any star field, provided we know its center, its size and the precise date of the exposure (between 1949 and 2009). Our data mining workflow performs cone search queries on SkyBoT and VizieR to extract all the known astronomical objects observed by the survey. Then the sources which are detected in the survey are correlated with the known objects to determine the matched and unmatched objects.

The Virtual Observatory effort has undergone a substantial evolution over the last four years. In the talk we will discuss the directions of the current effort, and consider the direction along which the Virtual Observatory might evolve along with various other large astronomy projects. We will also discuss similar efforts in other disciplines and the relation of the VO to Grid Computing.

Since 2005, the workflow working group of OV-France gathers astronomers from five french institutes with common objectives: (i) defining use cases of general interest; (ii) identifying the simplest workflow structure allowing portability; and (iii) suggesting solutions for designing and exploiting easily such workflows (cf. Astrogrid developments). Our workflow definition is the following: a sequence of tasks executed within a controlled context by an architecture taking into account VO standards.

We consider here image analysis pipelines and examine how data and processes could be described in the context of the VO. The tasks chain is considered as a workflow, not only in terms of computing and resource allocation as in the Grid community, but in terms of data analysis know-how. Such pipelines may be published as coarse grain tool boxes and provide reference examples to the user.

Most plotting tools tend to load all the data to be plotted into main memory and then use the in-memory data for the actual operations such as plotting. Our Analysis shows that in case of such interactive applications, as the memory usage grows, the response time increases in a significant fashion resulting in poor user interactivity. Further, in cases where the data size exceeds the limits imposed by the available physical memory, the entire data cannot be loaded in memory for performing any kind of operation.

Montage is a portable, scaleable toolkit that runs on end-users desktops, clusters, and computing grids. It generates astronomical image mosaics that preserve the calibration and photometry in the input FITS files. The code is available for download at the project website at <http://montage.ipac.caltech.edu>, and includes independent modules for image discovery (including support for VO image access protocols), image reprojection, rectification of the sky background to a common level and image co-addition.

We present VisIVO a software for the visualisation and analysis of astrophysical data which can be retrieved from the Virtual Observatory framework and for cosmological simulations. VisIVO is VO standards compliant and supports the most important astronomical data formats such as FITS, HDF5 and VOTables. Data can be retrieved directly connecting to an available VO service (i.e., VizieR WS), loaded in the local computer memory where they can be further selected, visualised and manipulated.