TY - JOUR
T1 - Astrolabe
T2 - Curating, linking, and computing astronomy's dark data
AU - Heidorn, P. Bryan
AU - Stahlman, Gretchen R.
AU - Steffen, Julie
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2018. The American Astronomical Society. All rights reserved..
PY - 2018/5
Y1 - 2018/5
N2 - Where appropriate repositories are not available to support all relevant astronomical data products, data can fall into darkness: Unseen and unavailable for future reference and reuse. Some data in this category are legacy or old data, but newer data sets are also often uncurated and could remain dark. This paper provides a description of the design motivation and development of Astrolabe, a cyberinfrastructure project that addresses a set of community recommendations for locating and ensuring the long-term curation of dark or otherwise at-risk data and integrated computing. This paper also describes the outcomes of the series of community workshops that informed creation of Astrolabe. According to participants in these workshops, much astronomical dark data currently exist that are not curated elsewhere, as well as software that can only be executed by a few individuals and therefore becomes unusable because of changes in computing platforms. Astronomical research questions and challenges would be better addressed with integrated data and computational resources that fall outside the scope of existing observatory and space mission projects. As a solution, the design of the Astrolabe system is aimed at developing new resources for management of astronomical data. The project is based in CyVerse cyberinfrastructure technology and is a collaboration between the University of Arizona and the American Astronomical Society. Overall, the project aims to support open access to research data by leveraging existing cyberinfrastructure resources and promoting scientific discovery by making potentially useful data available to the astronomical community, in a computable format.
AB - Where appropriate repositories are not available to support all relevant astronomical data products, data can fall into darkness: Unseen and unavailable for future reference and reuse. Some data in this category are legacy or old data, but newer data sets are also often uncurated and could remain dark. This paper provides a description of the design motivation and development of Astrolabe, a cyberinfrastructure project that addresses a set of community recommendations for locating and ensuring the long-term curation of dark or otherwise at-risk data and integrated computing. This paper also describes the outcomes of the series of community workshops that informed creation of Astrolabe. According to participants in these workshops, much astronomical dark data currently exist that are not curated elsewhere, as well as software that can only be executed by a few individuals and therefore becomes unusable because of changes in computing platforms. Astronomical research questions and challenges would be better addressed with integrated data and computational resources that fall outside the scope of existing observatory and space mission projects. As a solution, the design of the Astrolabe system is aimed at developing new resources for management of astronomical data. The project is based in CyVerse cyberinfrastructure technology and is a collaboration between the University of Arizona and the American Astronomical Society. Overall, the project aims to support open access to research data by leveraging existing cyberinfrastructure resources and promoting scientific discovery by making potentially useful data available to the astronomical community, in a computable format.
KW - astronomical databases
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U2 - 10.3847/1538-4365/aab77e
DO - 10.3847/1538-4365/aab77e
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85047258249
SN - 0067-0049
VL - 236
JO - Astrophysical Journal, Supplement Series
JF - Astrophysical Journal, Supplement Series
IS - 1
M1 - 3
ER -