Three Centres

1. the EURO-VO Data Centre Alliance (DCA), an alliance of European data centres who populates the EURO-VO with data, provides the physical storage and computational fabric and who publishes data, metadata and services to the EURO-VO using VO technologies;

2. the EURO-VO Facility Centre (VOFC), an organisation that provides the EURO-VO with a centralised registry for resources, standards and certification mechanisms as well as community support for VO technology take-up and dissemination and scientific program support using VO technologies and resources;

3. the EURO-VO Technology Centre (VOTC), a distributed organisation that coordinates a set of research and development projects on the advancement of VO technology, systems and tools in response to scientific and community requirements.

Data Centre Alliance (DCA)

The DCA is a persistent alliance of data centre communities represented at a national level. Through membership in the DCA, a nation's community of data curators and data service providers is represented in a forum that facilitates the take-up of VO standards, shares best practices for data providers, consolidates operational requirements for VO-enabled tools and systems and enables the identification and promotion of scientific requirements from programs of strategic national interest that require VO technologies and services. Funds for the DCA have been allocated by the European Community, within the Sixth Framework Programme (FP6), in September 2006.

Facility Centre (VOFC)

The VOFC provides a "public face" to the EURO-VO. Through outreach, support of VO-enabled science projects in the community, workshops and schools, the VOFC represents a central support structure to facilitate the broad take-up of VO tools by the community. The VOFC also supports the EURO-VO Science Advisory Committee (SAC) to ensure appropriate and effective scientific guidance from the community of leading researchers outside the mainstream VO projects. The SAC provides an up-to-date stream of high-level science requirements to the EURO-VO. The VOFC further provides central services to the DCA for resource registry, metadata standards and EURO-VO access. Funding for the VOFC has been allocated by the European Community, within the Seventh Framework Programme (FP7) in February 2008, as part of the Euro-VO AIDA project.

Technology Centre (VOTC)

The VOTC consists of a series of coordinated technology research and development projects conducted in a distributed manner across the member organisations. The first project under the VOTC is the VO-TECH project, funded through a European Community FP6 Proposal and contributions from the Universities of Edinburgh, Leicester, and Cambridge in the United Kingdom, ESO, CNRS and Université Luois Pasteur (France), and INAF (Italy). Additional projects can be brought to the VOTC via other member organisations; one such example is ESA-VO. The VOTC provides a mechanism to coordinate and share technological developments, a channel for DCA and VOFC requirements to be addressed and for technological developments to be distributed to the community of data centres and individual scientists in a coordinated and effective manner.