The archive system implements a very simple search interface that permits queries by coordinates/radius and/or range(*) of magnitudes, colors and effective temperatures. The default search radius is set to 5 arcsec. The user can also select the maximum number of sources to return (with values ranging from 10 to unlimited).
The result of the query is a HTML table with all the sources found in the archive fulfilling the search criteria. Detailed information on the output fields can be obtained placing the mouse over the question mark ("?") located close to the name of the column. The system returns the coordinates, both in decimal and sexagesimal degrees, the object identifier, the temperature obtained from VOSA as well as a visualization of the SED fitting by just cliking on the Teff value, and the SDSS, 2MASS, UKIDSS (LAS and GCS surveys), VISTA (VHS) and WISE magnitudes. Results can be sorted by just clicking on the name of the column. The system also includes a link to the finderchart capability developed at IRSA and to the spectroscopic datasets described in Section 4 of the paper.
The archive implements the SAMP (Simple Application Messaging Protocol). SAMP allows applications to communicate with each other in a seamless and transparent way for the user. This way, the results of a query can be easily transferred to other VO applications, such as, for instance, Topcat (Fig A2).
The Virtual Observatory (VO) is an international initiative whose primary goal is to provide an efficient access and analysis of the information hosted in astronomical archives and services. Having a VO-compliant archive is an important added value for an astronomical project to guarantee the optimum scientific exploitation of their datasets.
Our archive system has been designed following the IVOA standards and requirements. In particular, it implements the Cone Search protocol, a standard defined for retrieving records from a catalogue of astronomical sources. The query made through the Cone Search service describes a sky position and an angular distance, defining a cone on the sky. The response returns a list of astronomical sources from the catalogue whose positions lie within the cone, formatted as a VOTable.