The data zoo in Astro-WISE

In this paper we describe the way the Astro-WISE information system (or simply Astro-WISE) supports the data from a wide range of instruments and combines multiple surveys and their catalogues. Astro-WISE allows ingesting of data from any optical instrument, survey or catalogue, processing of this data to create new catalogues and bringing in data from different surveys into a single catalogue, keeping all dependencies back to the original data. Full data lineage is kept on each step of compiling a new catalogue with an ability to add a new data source recursively. With these features, Astro-WISE allows not only combining and retrieving data from multiple surveys, but performing scientific data reduction and data mining down to the rawest data in the data processing chain within a single environment.