Current astronomical facilities on the WWW support anonymous access to public-domain resources with very limited workflows. To meet even current aspirations, the Virtual Observatory needs to operate extensive workflows that also include access to restricted resources. AstroGrid (see http://www.astrogrid.org/), a UK eScience project with collaborating groups drawn from the major UK data archive centres, is currently creating the UK's virtual observatory (Lawrence, 2002, these proceedings). We present use cases from AstroGrid's survey of requirements that show a need for a pervasive infrastructure for identifying users and controlling access to facilities and data. We describe in outline AstroGrid's architecture for this infrastructure.

Date Published: 16 December 2002
PDF: 9 pages
Proc. SPIE 4846, Virtual Observatories, (16 December 2002); doi: 10.1117/12.459722

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 4846:
Virtual Observatories
Alexander S. Szalay, Editor(s)