Spreading DIRT with Web Services

Over the past 5 years, we have created quid developed the Web Infrared Tool Shed (WITS), a collection of web pages and programs ("tool boxes") for the analysis of astronomical objects that emit primarily in the wavelength range 2 to to 1 nun. WITS provides the astronomical community with a uniform set of models over a large parameter space of source properties. One of the toolboxes is the Dust InfraRed Toolbox (DIRT), a comprehensive Java applet for modeling astrophysical process in circumstellar dust shells around young and evolved stars. The DIRT database currently holds about 600,000 model spectral energy distributions. To facilitate greater flexibility in retrieval and visualization of these models, we aim to provide access to the model database through a variety of Web Services. We describe here a. simple service that retrieves a requested model and returns it as a VOTable. This is the first step towards interoperability with a Theory VO. We also describe the classes of Web Service that a theory-based VO should provide.