Storing and accessing the largest astronomical catalogues with the SAI CAS project

Extract

One of the main goals of the Virtual Observatory activities right now is to provide the simple and powerful access to the large existing astronomical datasets in the VO compatible way. That is why we want present the results of the recent development of Sternberg Astronomical Institute Catalogue Access Services (SAI CAS) project – the first and the only project in Russia, which provides on-line access to the major astronomical catalogues and different services on top of them. It is developed by a group of astronomers in a framework of SAI Astronet project, funded by Russian Foundation for Basic Research. SAI CAS is an open-source implementation of the general Catalogue access service (influenced by SDSS CASjobs & OpenSkyQuery projects), based on original algorithms and open-source software. We decided to build our own system providing an effective access to the major astronomical catalogues and different services including cone-searches and cross-matching of user data with hosted catalogues.