This proposal describes prototype development for a Virtual Solar-Terrestrial Observatory (VSTO), a shared distributed infrastructure for the solar-terrestrial physics community. The VSTO, through ontology and schema development, web portal and analysis tool provision, and data assimilation tools, will enable mining and processing of large distributed data sets in a grid environment linking together compute and storage resources at NCAR to the solar-terrestrial physics community. The targeted user field of science is solar, solar-terrestrial, and space physics (SSTSP).
Broader impact and intellectual merit extend across the main technical work areas: ontology development will allow for new integration and merging of existing semantic metadata in an interdisciplinary setting with resulting tool creation for ontologies and their upkeep; data assimilation techniques will be developed and applied by leveraging ongoing efforts at NCAR, such as the Virtual Solar Observatory; and at the system level serve as an operational prototype for a new distributed cyberinfrastructure serving a broader community dealing with space weather activities.
