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 - Funding Information:
Major funding agencies increasingly recognize the importance that public access to research output has in facilitating knowledge production, particularly when this research is funded through public support. Many funding agencies now require proposers to provide plans for data management, and also to upload copies of resulting journal articles to public archives. The National Science Foundation (NSF 2015), a leading source of funding for astronomical research and instrument construction in United States, recently published a vision to explore how to improve public access to data, including storage, preservation, discoverability, and reuse, with a focus on data and publications associated with federally funded scientific research. In response to this plan, NSF sponsored a series of workshops within the Directorate for Mathematical and Physical Sciences to obtain feedback from the research community, and to produce recommendations for NSF on realizing this vision. Through this process, the research community is exploring existing initiatives exemplifying best practices and models that could be adapted by NSF (Hanisch et al. 2017), indicating that the topic of open data and supporting cyberinfrastructure is of cutting-edge importance now and for the future of astronomy.
Funding Information:
well-curated data through access to curation resources and budgeting for data management in engineering and project plans, and that the uncurated data distributed throughout the Long Tail—i.e., the lower annual funding part of this distribution—represent potentially valuable information that could be relevant to current research projects; curation of all data, including those from smaller projects, may lead to new discoveries. While there are resources to provide long-term homes for some of these data, much of the data from small projects end up without long-term curation. This view is supported by reports of scientists from the workshops discussed in later sections.
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 -