Related papers: Digital planetariums as virtual museums for discov…
We review some of the scientific opportunities and technical challenges posed by the exploration of the large digital sky surveys, in the context of a Virtual Observatory (VO). The VO paradigm will profoundly change the way observational…
In the era of big data astronomy, next generation telescopes and large sky surveys produce data sets at the TB or even PB level. Due to their large data volumes, these astronomical data sets are extremely difficult to transfer and analyze…
Since we cannot put stars in a laboratory, astrophysicists had to wait till the invention of computers before becoming laboratory scientists. For half a century now, we have been conducting experiments in our virtual laboratories. However,…
The ability to represent scientific data and concepts visually is becoming increasingly important due to the unprecedented exponential growth of computational power during the present digital age. The data sets and simulations scientists in…
The Virtual Observatory (VO) is realizing global electronic integration of astronomy data. One of the long-term goals of the U.S. VO project, the Virtual Astronomical Observatory (VAO), is development of services and protocols that respond…
We make a case for "planetary computing" -- infrastructure to handle the ingestion, transformation, analysis and publication of global data products for furthering environmental science and enabling better informed policy-making. We draw on…
Immersive technologies are capable of transporting people to distant or inaccessible environments that they might not otherwise visit. Practitioners and researchers alike are discovering new ways to replicate and enhance existing tourism…
Despite the large budgets spent annually on astronomical research equipment such as telescopes, instruments and supercomputers, the general trend is to analyse and view the resulting datasets using small, two-dimensional displays. We report…
The Planetary project develops a general framework - the Planetary system - for social semantic portals that support users in interacting with STEM (Science/Technology/Engineering/Mathematics) documents. Developed from an initial attempt to…
On the occasion of the International Year of Astronomy (IYA2009), we present a new interactive dictionary of astronomy and astrophysics, which contains about 7000 entries. This interdisciplinary and multicultural work is intended for…
Contemporary debates on "open science" mostly focus on the pub- lic accessibility of the products of scientific and academic work. In contrast, this paper presents arguments for "opening" the ongoing work of science. That is, this paper is…
A new generation of digital repositories could be based on direct representation of the contents with rich semantics and models rather than be collections of documents. The contents of such repositories would be highly structured which…
Scientific communication inside and outside the classroom is the main means for providing an adequate understanding of how science and technological innovation relate to society. In order to achieve this goal, it is important to explore new…
We present the design and the prototype of a multisensory planetarium. The goal of this project is to offer a common perceptual and cognitive framework to all users, both sighted, deaf, and blind or visually impaired, concerning the…
Astronomy is entering a new era as multiple, large area, digital sky surveys are in production. The resulting datasets are truly remarkable in their own right; however, a revolutionary step arises in the aggregation of complimentary…
In dense clusters a bewildering variety of interactions between stars can be observed, ranging from simple encounters to collisions and other mass-transfer encounters. With faster and special-purpose computers like GRAPE, the amount of data…
Interstellar exploration will advance human knowledge and culture in multiple ways. Scientifically, it will advance our understanding of the interstellar medium, stellar astrophysics, planetary science and astrobiology. In addition,…
The Virtual Observatory has reached sufficient maturity for its routine scientific exploitation by astronomers. To prove this statement, here I present a brief description of the complete VO-powered PhD thesis entitled "Galactic and…
Planetary science beyond the boundaries of our Solar System is today in its infancy. Until a couple of decades ago, the detailed investigation of the planetary properties was restricted to objects orbiting inside the Kuiper Belt. Today, we…
In this work, I use a survey of senior visualization researchers and thinkers to ideate about the notion of progress in visualization research: how are we growing as a field, what are we building towards, and are our existing methods…