Related papers: The Digital Sky Project: Prototyping Virtual Obser…
Astrophysics lies at the crossroads of big datasets (such as the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope and Gaia), open source software to visualize and interpret high dimensional datasets (such as Glue, WorldWide Telescope, and OpenSpace), and…
Scientific endeavors such as large astronomical surveys generate databases on the terabyte scale. These, usually multidimensional databases must be visualized and mined in order to find interesting objects or to extract meaningful and…
The days of the lone astronomer with his optical telescope and photographic plates are long gone: Astronomy in 2025 will not only be multi-wavelength, but multi-messenger, and dominated by huge data sets and matching data rates. Catalogues…
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…
Experience suggests that structural issues in how institutional Astrophysics approaches data-driven science and the development of discovery technology may be hampering the community's ability to respond effectively to a rapidly changing…
As our capacity to study ever-expanding domains of our science has increased (including the time domain, non-electromagnetic phenomena, magnetized plasmas, and numerous sky surveys in multiple wavebands with broad spatial coverage and…
Astronomy is increasingly encountering two fundamental truths: (1) The field is faced with the task of extracting useful information from extremely large, complex, and high dimensional datasets; (2) The techniques of astroinformatics and…
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…
Scientific communities naturally tend to organize around data ecosystems created by the combination of their observational devices, their data repositories, and the workflows essential to carry their research from observation to discovery.…
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…
Astronomy is entering a new era of discovery, coincident with the establishment of new facilities for observation and simulation that will routinely generate petabytes of data. While an increasing reliance on automated data analysis is…
Astronomy began as a visual science, first through careful observations of the sky using either an eyepiece or the naked eye, then on to the preservation of those images with photographic media and finally the digital encoding of that…
As we are fast approaching the beginning of a paradigm shift in the field of science, Data driven science (the so called fourth science paradigm) is going to be the driving force in research and innovation. From medicine to biodiversity and…
The situation of data sharing in astronomy is positioned in the current general context of a political push towards, and rapid development of, scientific data sharing. Data is already one of the major infrastructures of astronomy, thanks to…
Nowadays, science has been coming into a new paradigm, called data-intensive science. While current studies of the new phenomenon focused on building up infrastructure for this new paradigm, yet a few studies concern users of scientific…
The tens of millions of radio sources to be detected with next-generation surveys pose new challenges, quite apart from the obvious ones of processing speed and data volumes. For example, existing algorithms are inadequate for source…
Some of the most exciting and promising areas of Astronomy research today are found at the boundaries of the discipline: the search for Exoplanets and Multi-Messenger Astronomy. In order to achieve breakthroughs in these research fields…
With the rapid advancements in observational technologies and the widespread implementation of large-scale sky surveys, diverse electromagnetic wave data (e.g., optical and infrared) and non-electromagnetic wave data (e.g., gravitational…
Wide-angle surveys have been an engine for new discoveries throughout the modern history of astronomy, and have been among the most highly cited and scientifically productive observing facilities in recent years. This trend is likely to…
We review the origins of the Virtual Observatory (VO) concept, and the current status of the efforts in this field. VO is the response of the astronomical community to the challenges posed by the modern massive and complex data sets. It is…