An Archive and Tools for Cosmological Simulations inside the Virtual Observatory

The Italian Theoretical Virtual Observatory (ITVO) is a test-bed project for the inclusion of theoretical data and related tools inside the International Virtual Observatory Alliance (IVOA, Hanisch & Quinn, 2003). We started cooperating with the IVOA community to develop standards and tools applicable to the theoretical data obtained from cosmological simulations. The database structure has been created with the main purpose of defining a structure for the cosmological simulations, generic enough to be able to ingest metadata from many types of simulations (N-body, N-body + SPH, Mesh, N-Body + AMR, etc.). The goals are the following: to provide searching criteria through which a single query can get data from different kinds of simulations archives; to develop appropriate IVOA tools to visualize and analyze the data; finally to make possible an easy comparison between theoretical and observational data. VisIVO has been used to find and visualize N-D boxes data, whereas Aladin has been modified to study the 2-D maps and permit the search for simulated galaxy clusters; we have now also generated a code that creates on-the-fly the profiles of ten quantities of the simulated galaxy clusters produced by the Gadget-2 code which can be easily visualized by TOPCAT. All of these tools can be connected to each other using the PLASTIC hub, a software specifically designed to provide interoperability among astronomical VO applications. This project is being developed as part of the VO-Tech/DS4, ITVO and VObs.it projects.