Enabling Scientific Research Using an Interdisciplinary Virtual Observatory

The need for access to and interoperability between these repositories is growing. Research groups need to access their own increasingly diverse data collections. As investigations begin to include results from many different experiments, researchers also need to access and utilize other research groups' data repositories in a single discipline or, more interestingly, in multiple disciplines. Also, it is not simply trained scientists who are interested in accessing scientific data; lay people are becoming interested in looking at trends in scientific data as well, for example, when they become engaged in climate discussions. The promise of the true virtual interconnected heterogeneous distributed international data repository is starting to be realized.