In the Virtual Observatory era, where we intend to expose scientists (or software agents on their behalf) to a stream of observations from all existing facilities, the ability to access and to further interpret the origin, relationships, and processi
ng steps on archived astronomical assets (their Provenance) is a requirement for proper observation selection, and quality assessment. In this article we present the different use cases Data Provenance is needed for, the challenges inherent to building such a system for the ESO archive, and their link with ongoing work in the International Virtual Observatory Alliance (IVOA).
Data Models are an essential part of automatic data processing, but even more so when trying to tie together data coming from many different data sources, as is the case for the International Virtual Observatory. In this talk we will review the diffe
rent data models used in the IVOA, which parts of that Data Modelling work are still incomplete, specially in radio wavelengths, and the work the AMIGA group has done within the IVOA Data Modelling Working Group to overcome those shortcomings both in missing data models and support for Radio Astronomy.
The AMIGA project (Analysis of the interstellar Medium of Isolated GAlaxies) is an international collaboration led from the Instituto de Astrofisica de Andalucia (CSIC). The groups experience in radio astronomy databases turned, as a natural evolutio
n, into an active participation in the development of data archives and radio astronomy software. The contributions of the group to the VO have been mostly oriented towards the deployment of large VO compliant databases and the development of access interfaces (IRAM 30m Pico Veleta, DSS-63 70m in Robledo de Chavela). We also have been working in the development of an API for VO tools that will ease access to VO registries and communication between different VO software. A collaboration with the Kapteyn Astronomical Institute has started recently in order to perform a complete renovation of the only existing high-level software (GIPSY) for the analysis of datacubes, allowing its fully integration in the VO.
