Palomar-QUEST: A case study in designing sky surveys in the VO era

The advent of wide-area multicolour synoptic sky surveys is leading to data sets unprecedented in size, complexity and data through- put. VO technology offers a way to exploit these to the full but re- quires changes in design philosophy. The Palomar-QUEST survey is a major new survey being undertaken by Caltech, Yale, JPL and Indi- ana University to repeatedly observe 1/3 of the sky (∼ 15000 sq. deg. between –27° ≤ δ ≤ 27°) in seven passbands. Utilising the 48-inch Oschin Schmidt Telescope at the Palomar Observatory with the 112-CCD QUEST camera covering the full 4° x 4° field of view, it will generate ∼ 1TB of data per month. In this paper, we review the design of QUEST as a VO resource, a federated data set and an exemplar of VO standards.