Related papers: The Skysoft Project
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…
In 2023, ASTRON took the step of incorporating a dedicated User Experience (UX) designer into its software development process. This decision aimed to enhance the accessibility and usability of services providing access to the data holdings…
The recent development on large language models makes automatically constructing small programs possible. It thus has the potential to free software engineers from low-level coding and allow us to focus on the perhaps more interesting parts…
One of the Birds of a Feather (BoF) discussion sessions at ADASS XX considered whether a new journal is needed to serve the astronomical computing community. In this paper we discuss the nature and requirements of that community, outline…
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…
Relational databases (DBs) are ideal tools to manage bulky and structured data archives. In particular for Astronomy they can be used to fulfill all the requirements of a complex project, i.e. the management of: documents, software (s/w)…
The myADS-arXiv service provides the scientific community with a one stop shop for staying up-to-date with a researcher's field of interest. The service provides a powerful and unique filter on the enormous amount of bibliographic…
In this report, we present example data sets and collections for the BeSpaceD platform. BeSpaceD is a spatio-temporal modelling and reasoning software framework. We describe the content of a number of the data sets and how the data was…
Sustainable software ecosystems are difficult to build, and require concerted effort, community norms and collaborations. In science it is especially important to establish communities in which faculty, staff, students and open-source…
Recent technological advances in astronomy, particularly the growing popularity of smart telescopes for the general public, make it possible to develop highly effective detection solutions that are accessible to a wide audience, rather than…
Astronomers are good at sharing data, but poorer at sharing knowledge. Almost all astronomical data ends up in open archives, and access to these is being simplified by the development of the global Virtual Observatory (VO). This is a great…
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…
To fulfill the requirements of space object cataloging and enable automated intelligent responses to anomalous events, we designed a novel observation scheduling system named Sky Survey Schedule (SSS). This framework facilitates coordinated…
Enabling observability in software systems brings many benefits. It can, for example, ease the identification of issues or the implementation of improvements. It is especially critical to be able to observe sustainability-related dimensions…
The Astropy Project supports and fosters the development of open-source and openly-developed Python packages that provide commonly needed functionality to the astronomical community. A key element of the Astropy Project is the core package…
The Astrophysics Data System (ADS) provides an extensive system of links between the literature and other on-line information. Recently, the journals of the American Astronomical Society (AAS) and a group of NASA data centers have…
We describe preliminary investigations of using Docker for the deployment and testing of astronomy software. Docker is a relatively new containerisation technology that is developing rapidly and being adopted across a range of domains. It…
Euclid is a Europe-led cosmology space mission dedicated to a visible and near infrared survey of the entire extra-galactic sky. Its purpose is to deepen our knowledge of the dark content of our Universe. After an overview of the Euclid…
The software development process has evolved with respect to the problems in developing large and complex applications. There is a paradigm shift towards collaborative development, which necessitates the need to evaluate this approach. A…
easyaccess is an enhanced command line interpreter and Python package created to facilitate access to astronomical catalogs stored in SQL Databases. It provides a custom interface with custom commands and was specifically designed to access…