Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

National Virtual Observatory

Posted by michael on from the number-crunching dept.

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)."

1 of 66 comments (clear)

  1. The problem of data interfaces and the layman by JayBonci · · Score: 5, Interesting

    From what the article reads, it seems to be a very ambitious and interesting project. Very rarely do you see people trying to get together to spread information out to the web in such a fashion. The major problem in my (and I can imagine in their) mind is of format? How can you accomodate the mythical layman's and his or her inherent lack of skill, and still have it be available for advanced researchers to make use of.

    It seems that there is simply going to be a huge amount of data-cross referenced and collated. From the second page of the article, it seems to include pictoral data. I also hear talk of XML being thrown around, which is a good start, but there's a lot that goes into that transition. Are they looking to set the layman bar at "your novice astronomer", "the third grade science report", or "grad student". Where is this information really being targeted at the sub-obscure level.

    While I don't want to trivialize their massive IT effort, it seems that a lot of this is going to come down to the end user of the data. Their sample study using this information isn't trivial stuff, and does seem to set the aforementioned bar at somewhere in the undergrad-graduate level. Perhaps that is the nature of the data (I'm not that familiar with it). There's an XML schema, some request examples, and other framework stuff already in place to view by potential client writers.

    I'm glad to see XML being done the right way (by collaboration with its end users), and those pictures /numbers being available for public research. Maybe someone will throw together an inverse Terraserver or something with Whiz-bang true-layman appeal. Until then, the geeks bow at the effort, because man, space is BIG.

    Anyone closer to the project know of any simplification efforts?

    --jaybonci