Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias

The advances in technology (telescope, instruments, detectors, automated pipelines, computational capabilities,...)  are now permitting to collect multiparameter information of large regions of the sky and compare them with complex theoretical calculations. Both observational (most of) and theoretical (part of) data can be easily accessed from user-friendly online information systems, systems that are intensively used by the astronomical community.

However the heterogeneity (formats, units, access protocols, ...) among the different archives makes it very inefficient the data compilation from more than one resource and, in practice, the simultaneous query to multiple databases is done, most of the times, slowly and painfully by hand. This is a situation that represents a major drawback for multiwavelength analysis. Moreover, the analysis of the large datasets that are available from the archives is not compatible with the classical scenario in which the data is transferred for its local analysis at the astronomer\'s desktop.  These (lack of interoperability and management of large volumes of data) are the two problems that the Virtual Observatory, an initiative under way since about 2000, attempts to solve.

"What is the Virtual Observatory?", "Who is behind it?", "How can I be part of the VO?", "What are VO-tools?", "How can I use them?", "VO-Science? Is it already a reality?",..., are some of the questions that will be answered during this talk.