IVOA Roadmap

Since its formation in 2002, the IVOA can boast of a number of achievements:

• Reaching truly world-wide cohesion in debating and agreeing key astronomical standards. The IVOA is endorsed by the International Astronomical Union (IAU) as the accepted method for producing astronomical data-related standards. Our standards are passed on to IAU Commission 5 for ratification.
• Establishing a forum for discussing and debating astronomical data technology in general as well VO standards in particular. The twice yearly “Interoperability Meetings” have been a key feature in resolving international differences as well as sharing ideas and technology.
• Rapid agreement on an initial set of basic standards - a table exchange format, a specification for simple catalogue and image query services, the definition of metadata describing resources, a dictionary for standardised column names, and a suite of standards allowing the construction of VO registries. Services complying with these initial standards are already deployed around the world. Also very successful has been the definition of a simple standardised way for applications to pass messages between each other, so they can collaborate smoothly on VO tasks. At the time of writing the IVOA has agreed a crucial new standard, the Table Access Protocol, which allows software to send flexible queries to a wide variety of databases.

The IVOA is working hard on further standards, including those needed for virtual storage addressing, single sign on, semantic reasoning, grid and web service modularisation.

The last semestral roadmap document maintained by the TCG is the 2025A Roadmap, spanning the time between the June 2025 and November 2025 Interoperability meetings and can be found here (Roadmap 2025A).

All Technical Roadmap Documents can be found at this wiki page.