Related papers: Significant problems in FITS limit its use in mode…
Over the past century, major advances in astronomy and astrophysics have been largely driven by improvements in instrumentation and data collection. With the amassing of high quality data from new telescopes, and especially with the advent…
From the moment astronomical observations are made the resulting data products begin to grow stale. Even if perfect binary copies are preserved through repeated timely migration to more robust storage media, data standards evolve and new…
Many astronomy data centres still work on filesystems. Industry has moved on; current practice in computing infrastructure is to achieve Big Data scalability using object stores rather than POSIX file systems. This presents us with…
The main problems in transportation are accidents, increasingly slow traffic flow, and pollution. An intelligent transportation system (ITS) using external infrastructure can overcome these problems. For this reason, the number of such…
When working with astronomical data, metadata is also important. A general-purpose file format for transmission, processing and archiving large datasets should facilitate, among other things, both efficient processing of bulk data and…
A new set of software applications and libraries for use in the archival and analysis of pulsar astronomical data is introduced. Known collectively as the PSRCHIVE scheme, the code was developed in parallel with a new data storage format…
Twenty-five years ago the desktop computer started becoming ubiquitous in the scientific lab. Researchers were delighted with its ability to both control instrumentation and acquire data on a single system, but they were not completely…
Over the next decade we will witness the development of a new infrastructure in support of data-intensive scientific research, which includes Astronomy. This new networked environment will offer both challenges and opportunities to our…
Hyperatlas is an open standard intended to facilitate the large-scale federation of image-based data. The subject of hyperatlas is the space of sphere-to-plane projection mappings (the FITS-WCS information), and the standard consists of…
In this paper we describe the main features of the software package named FITSH, intended to provide a standalone environment for analysis of data acquired by imaging astronomical detectors. The package provides utilities both for the full…
We investigate the performance of Apache Spark, a cluster computing framework, for analyzing data from future LSST-like galaxy surveys. Apache Spark attempts to address big data problems have hitherto proved successful in the industry, but…
Astronomy has a distinguished tradition of using technology to accelerate the quality and effectiveness of science, and data-intensive initiatives such as the Virtual Observatory lead the way amongst other fields of science. However,…
Efficient identity management system has become one of the fundamental requirements for ensuring safe, secure, and transparent use of identifiable information and attributes. FIdM allows users to distribute their identity information across…
Over the past decade, astronomers have been using an increasingly larger number of web-based applications and archives to conduct their research. However, despite the early success in creating links across projects and data centers, the…
The increase of astronomical data produced by a new generation of observational tools poses the need to distribute data and to bring computation close to the data. Trying to answer this need, we set up a federated data and computing…
In February, 1997, the second Space Shuttle servicing mission to the Hubble Observatory will install the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS). This new instrument will greatly enhance the spectroscopic capabilities of the Hubble…
In view of increased interest in object-oriented systems for describing coordinate information, we present a description of the data model used by the Starlink AST library. AST provides a comprehensive range of facilities for attaching…
Radio astronomy is facing critical challenges due to an ever-increasing human-made signal density filling up the radio spectrum. With the rise of satellites, mobile networks, and other wireless technologies, radio telescopes are struggling…
We review some of the recent developments and challenges posed by the data analysis in modern digital sky surveys, which are representative of the information-rich astronomy in the context of Virtual Observatory. Illustrative examples…
We review some aspects of the current state of data-intensive astronomy, its methods, and some outstanding data analysis challenges. Astronomy is at the forefront of "big data" science, with exponentially growing data volumes and data…