The Italian community provides its contribution to the development of VO capabilities, also through the  participation in EU-funded international projects targeted to the development of tools to be subsequently used within the international VO:

• participation in the definition of standards (formats, protocols, vocabulary, etc.) within IVOA working groups: in particular, in close collaboration with CDS, there is leadership in the domain of semantics for the VO (UCDs);

• the definition of an appropriate data model (SimDB) and an access protocol (SimDAP) for theory data within the IVOA Theory Interest Group;

• in the framework of VO-TECH, the development of tools to compare of observational data with numerical simulations;  

• also within VO-TECH, studying components for the VO based on emergent technologies in the areas of the semantic web and ontologies;
• in the framework of VO-AIDA, the development of standards as SimDB and SimDAP and S3 protocol for microsimulations;

• VisIVO (Visualisation Interface to the Virtual Observatory), a visualisation and analysis software for astrophysical data, capable of handling both observational and theoretical data and fully interoperable in the VO framework (interfaced with Aladin, VizieR, Topcat, VO-Neural, etc.) through PLASTIC;

• VO-Neural, a tool using advanced soft computing tools to extract information from large and multi-parametric (both astronomical and non astronomical) databases using mainly supervised and unsupervised neural methods.

• within VO-DCA, the interconnection of VO with Computational Grids, particularly EGEE: investigation of methods to access Grid facilities from the VO, and vice-versa.


• registered the new VO services into EuroVO Registry, fully compatible with the latest IVOA Registry specifications, produced inside the VO-AIDA project.
• SAMP (Simple Application Message Protocol) is a messaging protocol that enables astronomy software tools to interoperate and communicate;
• PYSTIC a Python module to connect to a PLASTIC Hub from Python shell and program;