Related papers: The Digital Sky Project: Prototyping Virtual Obser…
Over the past decades and even centuries, the astronomical community has accumulated a signif-icant heritage of recorded observations of a great many astronomical objects. Those records con-tain irreplaceable information about long-term…
Astrophysics and Space Science are becoming increasingly characterised by what is now known as "big data", the bottlenecks for progress partly shifting from data acquisition to "data mining". Truth is that the amount and rate of data…
The Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) is the largest and most ambitious optical CCD survey undertaken to date. It will ultimately map out one quarter of the sky with precision photometry in five bands, high-quality astrometry, and spectra of…
In the past two years, the environment within which astronomers conduct their data analysis and management has rapidly changed. Working Groups associated with international societies and Big Data projects have emerged to support and…
I review the status of science with wide field surveys. For many decades surveys have been the backbone of astronomy, and the main engine of discovery, as we have mapped the sky at every possible wavelength. Surveys are an efficient use of…
Multi-object spectroscopy has been a key technique contributing to the current era of 'precision cosmology'. From the first exploratory surveys of the large-scale structure and evolution of the universe to the current generation of superbly…
Commodity cloud computing, as provided by commercial vendors such as Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, has revolutionized computing in many sectors. With the advent of a new class of big data, public access astronomical facility such as LSST,…
Astronomy is undergoing through a methodological revolution triggered by an unprecedented wealth of complex and accurate data. The new panchromatic, synoptic sky surveys require advanced tools for discovering patterns and trends hidden…
Since its inception in the early 2000, the Virtual Observatory (VO), developed as a collaboration of many national and international projects, has become a major factor in the discovery and dissemination of astronomical information…
Nowadays, many scientific areas share the same broad requirements of being able to deal with massive and distributed datasets while, when possible, being integrated with services and applications. In order to solve the growing gap between…
The Sloan Digital Sky Survey is an ambitious, multi-institutional project to create a huge digital imaging and spectroscopic data bank of 25% of the celestial sphere, approximately 10,000 deg^2 centred on the north galactic polar cap. The…
The first step in a science project is the acquisition and understanding of the relevant data. This paper outlines the results of a project to design and test network tools specifically oriented at retrieving astronomical data. The tools…
There has been an unprecedented and continuing growth in the volume, quality, and complexity of astronomical data sets over the past few years, mainly through large digital sky surveys. Virtual Observatory (VO) concept represents a…
Sky coverage is one of the most important pieces of information about astronomical observations. We discuss possible representations, and present algorithms to create and manipulate shapes consisting of generalized spherical polygons with…
The Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) is making a multi-colour, three dimensional map of the nearby Universe. The survey is in two parts. The first part is imaging one quarter of the sky in five colours from the near ultraviolet to the near…
The Atlasmaker project is using Grid technology, in combination with NVO interoperability, to create new knowledge resources in astronomy. The product is a multi-faceted, multi-dimensional, scientifically trusted image atlas of the sky,…
Astronomy has entered the big data era and Machine Learning based methods have found widespread use in a large variety of astronomical applications. This is demonstrated by the recent huge increase in the number of publications making use…
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 new frontier of cosmology will be led by three-dimensional surveys of the large-scale structure of the Universe. Based on its all-sky surveys and redshift depth, the SKA is destined to revolutionize cosmology, in combination with future…
In the distant past, astronomy was often intertwined with religion into a unified cosmos. As science became a distinct cultural enterprise, astronomy has witnessed a variety of rich interactions with other fields. Mathematical statistics…