Building the e-GrOV Virtual Observatory

This paper describes experiences of specifying and building e-GrOV, an infrastructure for developing scientific environments (i.e., observatories) that can process huge amounts of astronomical data and exploit the computing capabilities distributed among a Grid. E-GrOV is composed of three nodes distributed located in the University of las Americas, Puebla (UDLA), Mexican National Institute of Astrophysics, Optics and Electronics (INAOE), and the Autonomous University of Tlaxcala (UATx) connected through Internet 2 by using IPv6. The main objective of e-GrOV is to provide an underlying infrastructure to support the construction of a Mexican Virtual Observatory (MVO). By defining an MVO, astronomers will have the illusion of interacting with a single system that exploits astronomical data and enables to execute experiments during a reasonable execution time.