National Virtual Observatory 66
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)."
Re:"Open Source" Knowledge (Score:1, Insightful)
Not likely. Only about 5% of the worlds population have internet access, maybe a tad more.
Re:"Open Source" Knowledge (Score:3, Insightful)
">>The internet could prove to be the single factor which contributes greatest towards equality of educational opportunity for all around the world.
>Not likely. Only about 5% of the worlds population have internet access, maybe a tad more."
Putting that into perspective, how many people need to do serious research on Astronomy in that depth. It is a fairly abstract field that is well entrenched into academia.
Also put that 5% number into perspective for people who need to do serious research into Astronomy; of them, how many have access (at least part time) to the Internet? It's probably up there near 100%
While not a huge educational opportunity for everyone on the planet, we are looking at a serious contribution to the field.
--jaybonci
P2P as an alternative (Score:5, Insightful)
The P2P idea is interesting in that it could apply to individually collected small data sets. Here's how observational astronomy has traditionally worked:
Astronomer writes a proposal to do some research using a specific telescope(s)
Proposal gets accepted after peer review
Astronomer travels to observatory to spend many of his own nights collecting data
Astronomer takes the time to reduce and analyze his own data
Astronomer writes a paper(s) saying, "Hey - look what I did!"
(Sometimes) astronomer writes a proposal for further funding based on the merits of this work
This procedure is inefficient in that you sometimes get multiple people who are not working together, doing the same project on different telescopes. If I collect a bunch of data in one part of the sky, try to use it but don't actually get around to finishing and publishing a paper, and then archive it locally, nobody in the world knows that the data exists. So now if someone else wants to do the same project, they go to the telescope and recollect the same data. In other words, there's no central log of who's done what when it comes to individual observing.
P2P could be useful to remedy this. The problem is that astronomers tend to be very proprietary about their data. Sometimes research and publishing can be very competitive, and you don't want to give the competition an edge when it could mean that they publish a paper on a particular topic before you and reap the rewards, or get funding when you don't. So I think that most astronomers would share their data openly in a P2P network only after they were completely finished using it, and some would never do so.
The difference with the data sets being accessed by the proposed Virtual Observatory is that the people who create those sets typically get their funding with a stipulation that the data be publically accessible some time after the work is finished. They're not allowed to keep it proprietary even if they'd prefer to do so for competition reasons.
Re:Seems like $10 million might not be enough (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:The problem of data interfaces and the layman (Score:3, Insightful)
The first priority of the Virtual Observatory (VO) is making it easier for professional astronomers to combine data from different sources, but we're also committed to involving the amateur astronomy and general public - that will involve special portals and eventually special software tools. I would caution that the whole project is at a very early stage, but I'm optimistic that a few years from now you'll see some nifty tools to let you explore the universe from your web browser (I don't know about support for lynx as one person asked about, personally I prefer wget...). Note that most astronomy analysis software is open source, and most is *only* available for Unix/Linux, so many /. readers will have a leg up on the world if
they really want to do stuff with our data.
But you don't need fancy software to play with
the pretty pictures we make.
There are already a lot of good tools around - someone mentioned Tom McGlynn's Skyview, and he's part of the VO team (perhaps a better word would be Collective, since we are trying to assimilate everyone...) and the VO will provide middleware to make it easier for those public tools to interoperate and get their hands on more data. So it'll be a real help to people writing those kinds of service (Skyview, NED, Aladin, etc.), more directly I think than to most end users at least in the short term.
To address your specific question of format, the current idea seems to be XML descriptive wrappers paired with FITS binary data for most applications. But there are usually GIF/JPEG type preview images around, and the image viewer SAO DS9 [harvard.edu]for FITS data has been ported to PCs and Macs and is pretty easy to use. In the meantime, you may want to check out NED Level 5 [caltech.edu] for an excellent overview site on extragalactic astronomy.
- Jonathan