National Virtual Observatory

scubacuda writes "According to this Technology Review article, U.S. astronomers (compliments of a $10M grant from the National Science Foundation) are building a National Virtual Observatory to make accessible terabytes of astrononomical data to a web browser. One interesting challenge is how the scientists are going to query so many *different* distributed databases (which they're leaving in their respective places to avoiding clogging network bandwidth)."

Comments

Re:The problem of data interfaces and the layman

[KjetilK]

IAAABDTTALA (I Am An Astronomer, But Don't Take This As Legal Advice), and I doubt that they are actually aiming this at the layman. What they are doing is opening it up to everyone, and everyone is free to use it and learn how to use it, but really, you expect mainly professional astronomers to use it.

There are lots of databases that follows this philosophy allready, the NASA Astrophysics Data System, the Digitized Sky Survey, not to speak of the larger arxiv.org. You can all grab whatever you like from there.

That being said, there are a number of amateur astronomers who are extremely dedicated and are willing to obtain the skill needed to use such a system, even if there is a tough learning curve. These can be considered "laymen", but they are actually very good at what they do. That's the kind of "laymen" you would expect to use it. Not Joe Sixpack, but the people who are dedicated enough to learn how to use it.

Re:How much will this data get re-analyzed?

[ghostlibrary]

A lot of astronomy data is looked at by its principal investigator (PI) for something specific. Really, data has 5 'lives'.

1) The original proposal by the PI, e.g. 'looking for cornonal emissions from DI Peg, an Algol-type system'. Sort of the pass/fail of the research world.

2) Survey. Someone decides to do a survey study among existing data, e.g. "Light curves from all Algol-type systems".

3) Unexpected. Someone finds a new thing to look for, sometimes due to better theoretical understanding. "Coronal sources should be iron-enhanced, so let's reanalyze DI Peg, specifically looking for iron lines."

4) Data-mining. Searching an archive for a given property. "Looking for all sources with X-ray emission above a given threshold... hey, DI Peg matched!"

5) Grad students. Doing their thesis on a topic, use archival data to support. "Dissertation on coronal systems, using data from DI Peg and others".

So data is often used beyond its initial acquisition!

Re:Web Browser

[ghostlibrary]

Is it possible to look at the universe with, say, lynx?

I know this was a joke, but that's actually a topic debated by webmasters at GSFC. In theory, all NASA web pages should be accessible, e.g. all browsers, readers for the blind, etc.

For images, this means descriptive image 'alt' tags. For links, it means including a link description. But what to do for data?

It's kinda subtle. The best answer is 'give data informative tags that can be domain-specific.' "Image 5b" is useless, saying "DI Peg data, X-ray wavelengths, reduced, FITS format" is good but tedious for whomever makes the page, giving a spec like 'ASCA dataset1, DI Peg, FITS, reduced' is something that could likely be automatically generated and fits the bill.

But the issue of folks using non-visual browsers is pretty real. Besides lynx and browsers for the blind, there's also data hunting scripts and programs that need to figure out what is on a page, and so it's a problem worth solving.