Building a Virtual Observatory for Heliophysics

Heliophysics is a new discipline that studies of the effect of the Sun on the Solar System and spans a number of existing scientific domains—solar physics, heliospheric physics, and magnetospheric and ionospheric physics. In order to build a virtual observatory for heliophysics we have to find ways to conduct searches that span the domains and track the evolution of phenomena in 4 dimensions as they propagate through interplanetary space. To facilitate this it will be necessary to improve the quality of the metadata that are used in the search and to describe the observations. We describe some of the issues and how these can be addressed.