Space weather and VSO 2.0

For over twenty years, the Virtual Solar Observatory (VSO) has provided a consistent interface for searching, filtering, and downloading a wide range of Heliophysics data, including data supporting space weather forecasting. Developed originally in Perl and utilizing the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), a new VSO, VSO 2.0, is being developed. This new version of the VSO is written predominantly in Python and uses the Representational State Transfer (REST) architecture. Our new approach has a strong focus on metadata, which will lead to services that provide access to data headers to facilitate metadata searches and even metadata analysis. In addition, the new VSO will allow much easier definition of search presets for datasets, such as space weather datasets (e.g., LASCO, GONG, NRT AIA, and NRT HMI), as well as user-defined presets. In this poster, we briefly describe the technologies used to build the new VSO and some of the capabilities of VSO 2.0 to facilitate timely access to near-real-time data critical for space weather forecasting.