User:Ibarbarisi/VOSpec

VOSpec is a tool for scientific analysis of astronomical spectra. Its handles many different types of spectra from different projects, as long as they are compliant with the standards from the Virtual Observatory. It is written in Java.

From a very simple interface VOSpec has gone through a series of changes and evolutions converting it in an Analysis tool of VO data.

History
VOSpec was born at the beginning of 2004 as an attempt to solve the problem of how to share spectra within the VO.

There were lots of tools for spectra analysis and display in the astronomical community. However, there was a need for a “VO-enabled” tool that could superimpose spectra coming from different projects within the VO and in VO-format.

One of the main reasons for the current absence of such a tool was the fact that astronomical spectra were not as well defined as, e.g., images are. The IVOA has made a significant effort in trying to define a Simple Spectral Access Protocol by which part of this problem is solved, giving the rules to be able to handle spectral data in the VO context.

An old problem in dealing with flux energy densities is the handling of different units. This problem has been traditionally dealt with by calling string parsers that convert between unit names fixed by some standard. Despite the different efforts to create a single standardized convention for unit names, several of these standards do currently exist. This creates a burden in the handling of units in the traditional way. On top of this, making legacy data available to the VO is crucial to the success of the VO as a whole. Those legacy data are normally not well formatted to conform to any standard, and therefore it is important to be able to deal with them with a simple definition of certain metadata.

Led by the aforementioned reasons, the Sciences Archives Team at ESAC decided to develop a tool to handle VO-compatible spectra and implement an algorithm based on dimensional analysis to handle units in a simple yet effective way. (see paper by Osuna-Salgado: Dimensional Anaysis applied to Spectrum Handling in Virtual Observatory Context).

Features

 * Able to load local spectra (FITS or VOTABLE format)
 * Can create and SED available and local spectra coming from any part of the wavelength spectrum
 * Can create SSAP wrapper around user's local spectra for immediate display
 * Common graphic manipulation options are available
 * Easy superimposion of spectra in different units and units handling
 * Possibility to save results as Image or VOTable
 * Polynomial, Black Body and Gaussian fitting, Normalization, Dereddening, Red-shift correction, Luminosity difference calculation, Mathematical Operations.
 * Access to theoretical spectra through the TSAP-like protocol
 * Best Fit to theoretical spectra
 * Access to Spectral Lines through the IVOA Simple Line Access Protocol (SLAP, ref Salgado et al(2005) )
 * Handling of Photometric Data Model

VOSpec Publications

 * EURO-VO Workshop 2008, Madrid, Spain - Multi-wavelength Astronomy using VOSpec


 * A VO-based solution to the origin of soft X-ray emission in obscured AGN


 * EURO-VO Workshop, March 2007, Villafranca del Castillo, Madrid, Spain - Astronomical Spectroscopy in the VO era: VOSpec


 * EURO-VO Workshop, March 2007, Villafranca del Castillo, Madrid, Spain - Spectroscopic lines in the VO context:IVOA model and Access


 * EURO-VO Workshop, Villafranca del Castillo, Madrid, Spain - VOSpec and highresolution X-ray line catalogues


 * PV2007, Oberpfaffenhofen/Munich, Germany - ESA Scientific Archives and inter-operable Virtual Observatory systems


 * ADASS Sept 2007, London, UK - VOSpec Spectral Analysis Tools


 * ADASS Sept 2007, London, UK - ESA Science Archives, VO tools and remote Scientific Data reduction in Grid Architectures


 * ADASS Sept 2007, London, UK - Data Visualization in the ESA Science Archives and ESA Virtual Observatory


 * ADASS 2006, Tucson, Arizona, USA - How to Access Spectral Line Databases in the IVOA: SLAP Services in VOSpec


 * ADASS 2006, Tucson, Arizona, USA - ESA VO: VO Services and Activities


 * PV 2005, Edinburgh - ESA RSSD Science Archives Inter-Operability and Virtual Observatory Services


 * ADASS 2005, El Escorial, Madrid - Theoretical Support to Observational data in VO Context


 * ADASS 2004, Pasadena, California, USA - ESA VO : Archives and VO Services


 * ADASS 2004, Pasadena, California, USA - VOSpec: A Tool for Handling Virtual Observatory Compliant Spectra