Accessing Multi-Dimensional Images and Data Cubes In the Virtual Observatory by Bruce Berriman.
From the post:
New instruments and missions are routinely producing multi-dimensional datasets, such as Doppler velocity cubes and time-resolved movies. Observatories such as ALMA and new integral field spectrographs on ground-based telescopes are generating data cubes , and future missions such as LSST and JWST will generate ever larger volumes of them. Thus the VO, via its standards body the International Virtual Observatory Alliance (IVOA), has made it a priority by September 2014 of developing a protocol for discovering data cubes and a reference service for accessing and downloading data cubes.
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Bruce includes a poster with a summary of the Simple Image Access Protocol (SIAP, v2).
For more details, consider the SIAP version 2.0 working draft.
The experience with SIAP will be useful when other domains scale up to the current astronomy data requirements.