Abstract
Motivated by the Electronic Geophysical Year (eGY; www. egy.org), which is one of four international celebrations of the 50th anniversary of the International Geophysical Year which occurred in 1957-1958, the first ever conference devoted to Virtual Observatories in Geosciences (VOiG) was held in Denver, Colorado, USA between June 11 and 14, 2007.The conference was sponsored by National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), United States Geological Survey (USGS), eGY, National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), and National Science Foundation (NSF), and was attended by 74 people from nine countries.Of the many contributed presentations from the conference, initially six were reviewed and selected to appear in this volume of Earth Science Informatics.These contributions are clustered under the broad discipline of space physics and largely sponsored by the innovative Virtual Observatories for Heliophysics Data program from the U.S. National Aeronautical and Space Administration.As is noted in all the contributed papers, the virtual observatory paradigm which was originated in the astronomy and astrophysics community, was quickly adopted into solar physics and space physics.More recently, other fields such as environmental science, aeronomy, oceanography, seismology, volcanology, hydrology, and ecology are embracing the paradigm to serve their diverse community needs.The papers represent an excellent cross-section of the developments that have taken place for solar and space