Westerbork Synthesis Radio Telescope
I’m a little behind with my updates but I’ll resist the temptation to overly condense all the .Astronomy news into one post – so I’ll stick to day-by-day overviews of the conference. The theme for Tuesday was “web-based research” – looking at how the web has changed the way we actually advance science (rather than just play with it). A thought aside – it seemed like a good idea to allocate a particular theme to each day, but it’s becoming clear to me that there is much overlap between these trends. And this, in fact, is the trend: research in astronomy, and in science in general, is being transformed by the technological advances that allow us to produce, distribute and transmit vast amounts of data and information around the world. Research isn’t “research” anymore, outreach isn’t “outreach”, and scientists aren’t “scientists”. Odd, isn’t it?
The day was opened by Andy Lawrence, of the University of Edinburgh, who talked to us via Skype about the developments in the world of Virtual Observatory. VO is an umbrella description of a number of worldwide initiatives to catalogue astronomical data to make them available to the entire astronomy community in an easy, streamlines and standardised. The idea is to end up with a desktop suite of research tools, with links to the data themselves, visualisation software like Aladin, literature searches and the like. Beyond standardisation and distribution, the potential of VO lies in what the community itself can do for the platform. Shared collaborative spaces could be incorporated in the VO model – like Wikis are currently used but with the added functionality offered by having immediate access to large datasets and visualisation tools. With data themselves in standardised format, users could provide annotations and comment, to be shared with collaborators, or with the whole community.
Many scientists keep blogs like this one – where do they fit in? In other disciplines, scientists sometimes use blogs as open research notebooks – providing an electronic record of their personal research notes. Sites such as OpenWetWare provide wiki-type platforms for scientists in the biological scientists to write about their work, post protocols, and have a shared workspace for their lab. A nice example I found was this group at Imperial College who research the malaria-transmitting anopheles mosquito. Any astronomers out there doing this, either individually or as a group? I don’t know of any.
Personally I like the idea of posting short research notes online, in a way that they can be time-stamped and given a unique and permanent identifier, so that they effectively become citeable by others. This would encourage scientists to talk about their results on shorter timescales than typical journal publication times, in a kind of “mini-paper” or “research letter” – call it what you like. These wouldn’t have to be peer-reviewed but left open for comment by the community.
We heard more about VO today Thursday, including a demonstration of the rather awesome tie-up between the data store and Microsoft’s World Wide Telescope. More about that in Thursday’s report….
A perfect demonstration of the need to move to a VO-type approach to data storage and distribution was given by two leading figures in the world-renowned Dutch radio astronomy community. Huib-Jan van Langevelde, Director of the Joint Institute for Very Long Baseline Interferometry in Europe (JIVE), and Michael Wise, Project Manager for LOFAR, the new European low frequency radio array. eVLBI and LOFAR are both excellent examples of new observational astronomy projects whose rates of data production will take us into PetaByte territory – quite staggeringly large amounts of data. Radio interferometry has the added complication that the data are produced in geographically distant locations, which makes data transport and processing pretty challenging.
The solutions that are being used for these projects are very impressive and I can’t possibly do them justice here given my limited knowledge of network thingybobs – but have another look at the talks if you’d like to learn more.
OK, that’s a lot of text already for a couple of hours of talks. I’ll save the second half of the morning for a separate post.To be continued!
In the mean time…. Read Andy Lawrence’s own take on his talk for amusement.
Image: Flickr user Roloff
Connect