The AVO Prototype

The Astrophysical Virtual Observatory (AVO) prototype is a suite of tools that serves as a testbed for scientific and technical use cases. For instance, it supports the Simple Image Access (SIA) protocol, hierarchical browsing based on the IDHA data model and fully exploits the potential of Unified Content Descriptors (UCD). Each of the software components of the AVO prototype is developed and maintained by a different team in a different country. All modules work stand-alone, but can be integrated. The AVO prototype consists of a browser backed by image and catalogue servers, a web service for the identification of sources in FITS images and a utility for analyzing the spectral energy distribution.