SOHO Long-term ARchive: Information Retrieval Approach

The SOho Long-term ARchive (SOLAR) is one of the three European data archives of the SOlar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) instruments. The SOHO archives adopt the Internet and the World Wide Web (WWW) as the platform to search, retrieve and disseminate science data and mission information. This paper presents the architecture and design overview of the archive built at the Turin Astronomical Observatory and a brief description of the available webbased Graphical User Interfaces developed to have access to the data remotely. SOLAR is foreseen to be operational not only during the SOHO mission (recently extended to 2007) but also for a 10-year period following the mission end (20072017).