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Domain: ivoa.net

Stories and comments across the archive that link to ivoa.net.

Comments · 7

  1. Not all IT is the same -- you want 'Informatics' by oneiros27 · · Score: 3, Interesting · on How Do You Organize Your Experimental Data?

    The problem is, most IT people have no idea what do with science data -- it'd be like going to a dentist because you're having a heart attack. They might be able to give general advice, but have clue what specifics need to be done. Likewise, IT might be people who are really good at diagnosing hardware, but they might suck at writing code. Not all IT specialists are cross-trained in enough topics to deal with this issue effectively (data modeling, UIs, database admin, programming, and the science discipline itself).

    There's a field out there called 'Science Informatics'. It's not a very large group, but there's a number of us who specialize in helping scientists organize, find, and generally manage data. Think of us as librarians for science data.

    Most of us would even be willing to give advice to people outside our place of work, as the better organized science data is in general, the more usable and re-usable it is. There's even a number of efforts to have people publish data, so it can be shared, verified, etc. And most of us have a programming background, so we might be able to share code with you, as we try to make it open source where we can, so we don't all have to re-solve the same problems.

    Because each discipline varies so much, both in how they think about their data, and what their ultimate needs are, we tend to be specialists, but there's a number of different groups out there, for example:

    There's also Bioinformatics, Health/medical informatics, chemical informatics, etc. plug in your science discipline + 'informatics' into your favorite search engine, and odds are you'll find a group, or person you can write to to try to get more info and advice.

    Recently, NSF just funded a few more groups to try to build out systems and communities : DataOne and the Data Conservancy, and I believe there's some more money still to be awarded.

  2. Re:The Petabyte Problem by zrq · · Score: 1 · on Getting Students To Think At Internet Scale

    Computer, show me all ship-like objects, in any profile. Ah, there it is."

    We are working on it IVOA.

  3. Re:All this stuff should be digitized and made pub by faxafloi · · Score: 1 · on Digitizing 100 Years of Astronomical Data

    ...but I've searched high-res sky images in the past without finding anything systematic except some specific projects such the Sloan Sky survey (which are just coordinates) or the odd marketing Hubble shot.

    If that's all you found, you didn't look hard enough. Sloan serves imaging and spectral data, and all of Hubble's science data (for example) has been available from three different data centers since 1992. (This is data we're talking about, not pretty pictures.) In fact, all NASA-funded missions are required to archive their data, and NSF is (finally) getting into the act. I don't know what ESA requires, but I know they're building a large archive. And just about every large ground-based project in development has a significant archival component.

    I'd say your previous employer's attitude ("our funding, our data") is the exception nowadays. Even privately funded projects are looking at archives, if only to connect to the VO.
  4. Re:so.. by oneiros27 · · Score: 2, Informative · on Google's Academic TB Swap Project

    So, if Google takes the raw data and does that color assignment itself, well, the result is theirs.
    I'm not so sure that the result in theirs, necessarily. They'd need to properly attribute it. Many science archives have rules about how to properly attribute their work.

    Don't get me wrong -- many of the scientists want people to use their data (eg, see The Astronomer's Data Manifesto), but they also want to know who's using it, because it's how they justify the value of their projects, and the costs incurred from distributing the data (especially for non-active projects).

    The science community is also working on the Science Commons (an equivalent of the Creative Commons for marking scientific data) and various federated search engines (eg, night time (astronomy) virtual observatories, as well as other space and earth science discipline specific VOs.).
  5. define 'substantial' by oneiros27 · · Score: 1 · on Publicly-Funded Research Data is Public?

    If you're talking on the order of a 6 month embargo, I could see that. If you're talking two years, I'd have to say that's too long.

    I may be biased on the matter, as one of my duties is to distribute some public research data. The data that we generate is released immediately, except for new missions, which have had embargos until they could finish testing the instruments. The data we get from other locations may be embargoed for a few months.

    For those who are new to the topic, I'd suggest you take a look at the OpenScience Project, the Science Commons, the NSF's 2003 Cyberinfrastructure Report, the NSB's Government Funding of Scientific Research and the Astronomer's Data Manifesto for a bit of background (specifically, see Ray Norris's Can Astronomy Manage its Data?).

  6. Re:Why no intercontinental cooperation? by zrq · · Score: 1 · on China and Russia to Launch Joint Mars Mission
    Sure, the US could push for a multilateral approach to space exploration. Now, stop and think about the current state of affairs in the 'states and you'll see why this isn't likely to happen.

    We do cooperate on some things, like the International Virtual Observatory Alliance.

    Which amongst others includes contributions from :

  7. Add units to numerical operands by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0 · on How Would You Improve SQL?

    SQL lacks units for numerical operands. If a column contains widget size in centimetres and I query for widget size with contraints in inches than the query "works" without errors but I get the wrong answer. This is a major problem for interoperability of archive DBs in science

    The International Virtual Observatory Alliance (http://www.ivoa.net/) has a SQL-like language called Astronomical Data Query Language and this is supposed to support units.