Jamie Budynkiewicz edited introduction.tex  about 10 years ago

Commit id: 42156754b40d4910410be73edf14eb32667de42b

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Designing such general purpose applications thus becomes an exercise in designing a framework that implements some basic, effective functionality for a wide set of use cases, while being highly extensible.  Iris, the Virtual Astronomical Observatory \footnote{www.usvao.org}  spectral energy distribution (SED) analysis tool, is such a VO-enabled application \cite{2012ASPC..461..893D}. application.  Iris was developed to provide the astronomical community with a desktop application for building, viewing and analyzing broadband spectro-photometric SEDs, while implementing VO standards and protocols and taking advantage of existing astronomy software. software \cite{2012ASPC..461..893D}.  Users may populate SEDs with data from file, built-in portals to data archives, and other VO applications. Iris is lenient on the data format, so while it natively supports VO-compliant files (properly annotated VOTABLE and FITS files), Iris can ingest ASCII, CSV, and other table-like formats with some user input. Iris also provides interactive data visualization and editing tools, and a SED fitting tool for fine-tuned modeling. Users may choose from a suite of provided astrophysical models, or load their own Python functions and template libraries. All front-end features of Iris completely hide the underlying technical VO standards and protocols from the user.