A significant fraction of the work of VOTECH was working on international
standards for the Virtual Observatory, either through individual
participation in working groups
of the International Virtual Observatory Alliance (IVOA), or through
co-ordinated European planning for input to the IVOA. The output
concerned was both documents and software - eg XML schema, and software
prototypes demonstrating the implementation of standards.
The international standards are made available at the
IVOA Documents Page.
Nearly all have participation by VOTECH team members, and some were
strongly led by VOTECH developments - for example the Simple Application
Messaging Protocol (SAMP), which began life in VOTECH as "PLASTIC". This enables
VO tools to be written as individual modules, as they are able to pass messages
and interoperate.
Various different pieces of software were developed through the
VOTECH project by the different DS groups. They cover a broad
spectrum of purposes and target users, everything from user desktop
software to middleware web services, and many of them are still
under active development. This page serves as a download site
for the main software developed during the VOTECH project, though
only as a snapshot of the latest versions as of VOTECH's completion.
In order to obtain the source code for a given piece of software you
will need to go to the developer's official website and contact them
directly.
Due to the distributed nature of the software development
institutions there is no simple way to create a software repository
that can keep up to date with the latest software versions.
In order to obtain the latest versions of
these software packages you should use the links provided to go
directly to the developers' official website and download from there.
The software downloads are divided up according to the DS under
which they were developed. The software name and a brief
description are provided. The links in the download column are
for the installation binary or executable for that particular
software, and are the latest version of the software as of the end
of the VOTECH Project (June 2009). To ensure you are
downloading the latest version click on the provided links to the
official websites.
VOTECH website is hosted at the Institute for
Astronomy, University of Edinburgh - last updated:
09-Nov-2009