The Russian Virtual Observatory: recent developments
by
Oleg Malkov
Institute of Astronomy, Moscow
Coauthors: Olga Dluzhnevskaya, Sergej Vereshchagin, Elena Kilpio, Dana Kovaleva

The Russian Virtual Observatory (RVO) has been officially recognized as one of the key projects of the Scientific Council on Astronomy of the Russian Academy of Sciences since December 2001.

The ultimate goal of the RVO initiative is to integrate resources of astronomical data accumulated in Russian observatories and institutions, and to provide Russian data to the rest of the world. RVO will be merged naturally into the International Astronomical Observatory. Another goal of the project is to provide Russian researchers with on-line access to the rich volumes of data and metadata that have been and will continue to be produced by astronomical survey projects.

The recent activity in these directions is rather manifold:

- collection of information about all available Russian and some former Soviet Union astronomical data resources, their classification and registration in the registries of other VO projects;

- digitization of plates and construction of an electronic libary, containing scans of the plates, obtained in Russian observatories;

- mirroring of principal world databases;

- construction of a special collection of links to useful resources, called Internet Resources in Astronomy (IRinA), that will be based on a multi-level classification scheme and will include comprehensive list of national resources.

RVO architecture, main tasks and roadmap are discussed in the presentation as well.

Date received: March 14, 2005