NVO Review -- San Diego -- 13-14 Jan 2005 1

The VO compared to Other O‘s

Jim GrayMicrosoft

THE US NATIONAL VIRTUAL OBSERVATORY

NVO Review -- San Diego -- 13-14 Jan 2005 2

The Big Picture: online-science

• Data ingest • Managing a petabyte• Common schema• How to organize it?• How to reorganize it?• How to coexist with others?

• Query and Visualization tools • Support/training• Performance

– Execute queries in a minute – Batch (big) query scheduling

The Big Problems

Experiments &Instruments

Simulationsfacts

facts

answers

questions

?Literature

Other Archives facts

facts

NVO Review -- San Diego -- 13-14 Jan 2005 3

Eventually, they will all be

integrated into a world-wide

digital library

There Are LOTS of Observatories

• High Energy Physics• Mission To Planet Earth (EOS)• Geology/Seismology• Oceanography• Hydrology• Climate• Agriculture• Ecology / Biosphere• Genomics/Proteomics/…• Epidemiology/Medicine / …• And…… Astronomy

NVO Review -- San Diego -- 13-14 Jan 2005 4

Astro VO compared to X VO

• Community– Started sooner (80’s) – All literature online– Have data sharing tradition – Smaller (1e4 professionals)– More cohesive – Astronomers know Math & Tech– No commercial/privacy issues

• Domain– Data is simpler– UCD common base vocabulary– Survey data volume is huge

Systematic and well-documented– Good analysis and simulation

at least by comparison.

• Community– Diverse groups do not see common issues– Building islands of information (stovepipes)– Need cyber-infrastructure but

• Have no funds to pay for it• Horrified by price• Disappointed in past investments

– No charter for data curation & preservation• Domain

– New instruments imply new science methods– Forced to “objectify” the science– Current tools inadequate for data avalanche

(from sensors and simulators)– Data avalanche requires

• New tools• New algorithms (data mining)• Data management and lineage (provenance)• Spatial and temporal data is a central problem.

DifferencesSimilarities

NVO Review -- San Diego -- 13-14 Jan 2005 5

Personal Observations

• World-Wide Telescope (VO & NVO) is a model for other domains (widely cited).

• It is important to – Document successes and failures– Share tools and techniques– Benefit from other’s advances and tools– Pioneer problem areas

• Common data model / definitions• Curation• Preservation• Tools (visualization, analysis, spatial, temporal, …