JISC

Latest News (October 2011): This project has now finished. Software from the project for other astronomers to use is available on Google Code. A full report is to follow.

Astronomers record basic about and stars and other celestial matter in large-scale catalogues, but then interpret the data in journal articles, without digital links between them. AstroDabis looks is exploring how such links can be built.

Astronomers are very 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), which is defining the standards needed to turn the collection of independent archives into an interoperable federation of the world’s astronomy data resources.

This is a great advance, but the fundamental problem remains that these archives contain very basic data – e.g., positions, shapes and brightnesses of celestial sources detected in an image of the sky – and all the astrophysical interpretation ofthat data – e.g., which source is a quasar, which a low-mass star and which an image artefact – is contained in journal papers, with very little linkage back from the literature to the original data archives.

It is currently impossible for an astronomer to pose a query like “give me all sources in this data archive that have been identified as quasars” and this limits the effective exploitation of these archives.

It mean the user of an archive has no direct means of taking advantage of the knowledge derived by its previous users through the deployment of prototype services enabling astronomers to record annotations about data stored in archives and have them published in a manner which makes them directly queryable in conjunction with those archives.

This will provide a mechanism for the community to enrich existing data resources by sharing the knowledge it has derived from them in a directly usable form. We shall deploy two interfaces to the annotations, oneastronomy-specific one, using existing VO protocols, and a second exploiting generic Linked Open Data (LOD) and RDF techniques.