Virtual Observatory meets virtually.

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Twice a year, the International Virtual Observatory Alliance (IVOA) gathers somewhere in the world for the IVOA interoperability workshop¹. The goal of those meetings is to bring together the people working on the standards and the people using them, either to share data or to create applications that can be used to obtain it.

Due to the current extraordinary circumstances, the meeting that was due to happen in Sydney in the week from 4-8 May had to be cancelled. As a replacement, the Virtual Observatory Interoperability meeting went virtual itself!

To promote attendance from as many people as possible, the meeting was split into three time slots spanning "midday" in three time zones so that the burden of having to call in very early or late was equally shared. It was a very well attended meeting, with 207 participants registered and several sessions getting close to 100 people participating.

A very notable session was on the inclusion of (more) radio astronomy data in the VO², which is both a wish of the IVOA as well as many radio observatories. To this end, an Interest Group was formed which brings together several major radio astronomical instruments and institutes (including both ASTRON and JIVE). The group will be led by Mark Lacey (NRAO) with François Bonnarel (CDS) as vice-chair. The kickoff meeting of the interest group was very well attended by ~90 participants.

¹To remind you, the IVOA defines the Virtual Observatory (VO) standards that makes it possible to publicly find, share and operate on astronomical data".

² Including visibility data, whose description is not very well covered by current IVOA standards.