Speaker
Description
INAF manages three single dish radio telescopes (Medicina, Noto and Sardinia Radio Telescope, SRT). The three dishes are also part of the European VLBI Network and the International VLBI Service for Geodesy & Astrometry. Also, SRT is involved in international collaborations dedicated to pulsar observation, namely the European Pulsar Timing Array and the Large European Array for Pulsars project.
The increasing importance of Science Archives and archive mining in defining the ultimate productivity of an observing facility motivated the Italian Centre for Astronomical Archives (IA2) service to develop and maintain the INAF Radio Data Archive. Such a geographically-distributed archival facility flexibly handles different data models and formats, also supporting data discovery/access through Virtual Observatory (VO).
In this contribution I will give an overview of the archival system, addressing challenges posed by increasing data rates/volumes produced by the state-of-the-art digital backends. I will also present the INAF effort in modeling such data to enable their discoverability, access and retrieval through VO tools and services.
