SOLARNET-Italian Solar Archive Federation. The First Italian Virtual Observatory Application

We describe the implementation of the national project SOLARNET (SOLar ARchive NETwork) aimed at federating the heterogeneous Italian solar data archives into a VO (Virtual Observatory) framework as a single integrated database, and providing users with tools to search and retrieve specific data sets. It interoperates using the SOAP/XML Web Services exposed by each single node and managed via a unified Portal.This project is the first real Italian Virtual Observatory application using the standard defined by the IVOA (International Virtual Observatory Alliance) working groups.