Optical layout of LSST, the catalyst for many semantic headaches

Like many sciences, astronomy is becoming increasingly data-rich. The next generation of observatories, such as the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, will produce staggering amounts of data every night and push the subject into the petabyte regime. The large surveys that feed a substantial portion of the research community today, such as the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, are already demonstrating the difficulties of converting large datasets into knowledge: converting the data into catalogues, estimating selection biases and performing robust statistics are all common problems to those working with the data. Astroinformatics, or the science behind the information captured in our wealth of astronomical data, is therefore becoming an increasingly relevant field of study. The AstroInformatics 2010 conference was organised with the aim of essentially defining this emerging field.

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