Gaia DR2 and the Virtual Observatory: VO in Operations New Era
Résumé
During the last decade, the IVOA (International Virtual Observatory Alliance) has been tasked with the difficult task of defining standards to interchange astronomical data. These efforts have been supported by many IVOA partners in general and by the ESAC Science Data Centre (ESDC) in particular, that have been collaborating in the definition of standards and in the development of astronomical VO-inside archives. New ESDC archives, like Gaia, ESASky and the ones in development like Euclid, makes use of VO standards not only as a way to expose the data but, also, as the architectural design of the system. The Gaia Data Release 2 archive, has been a global effort done not only concentrated into the central archive at ESAC, but also as a collaboration with partner data centers like CDS, ARI, ROE and other members of DPAC. All Gaia partners make use of VO protocols to expose Gaia data as a principle. With this release, the level of dissemination and community endorsement of the VO protocols have entered into a new phase. The percentage of the Gaia expert community that makes use of VO standards has been increased to an unprecedented level of use; 34,000 users accessing the ESA Gaia Archive interface; over 5,000 advanced users sending more than 1,5 million data analysis queries during the only the first week and just counting the ESA Gaia Archive. These standards are offered to the community in a transparent way (like SAMP or VOSpace to interchange data), as VO protocols extensions like the Tabular Access Protocol extension (TAP+) or as direct use, like the Astronomical Data Access Language (ADQL) that the users learn in order to implement data mining scientific use cases that were almost impossible in the past. We will describe how VO protocols simplify the work of design and implementation of the astronomical archives and the current level of endorsement by the scientific community.