19,215 research outputs found
Connecting the time domain community with the Virtual Astronomical Observatory
The time domain has been identified as one of the most important areas of
astronomical research for the next decade. The Virtual Observatory is in the
vanguard with dedicated tools and services that enable and facilitate the
discovery, dissemination and analysis of time domain data. These range in scope
from rapid notifications of time-critical astronomical transients to annotating
long-term variables with the latest modeling results. In this paper, we will
review the prior art in these areas and focus on the capabilities that the VAO
is bringing to bear in support of time domain science. In particular, we will
focus on the issues involved with the heterogeneous collections of (ancillary)
data associated with astronomical transients, and the time series
characterization and classification tools required by the next generation of
sky surveys, such as LSST and SKA.Comment: Submitted to Proceedings of SPIE Observatory Operations: Strategies,
Processes and Systems IV, Amsterdam, 2012 July 2-
Curating E-Mails; A life-cycle approach to the management and preservation of e-mail messages
E-mail forms the backbone of communications in many modern institutions and organisations and is a valuable type of organisational, cultural, and historical record. Successful management and preservation of valuable e-mail messages and collections is therefore vital if organisational accountability is to be achieved and historical or cultural memory retained for the future. This requires attention by all stakeholders across the entire life-cycle of the e-mail records.
This instalment of the Digital Curation Manual reports on the several issues involved in managing and curating e-mail messages for both current and future use. Although there is no 'one-size-fits-all' solution, this instalment outlines a generic framework for e-mail curation and preservation, provides a summary of current approaches, and addresses the technical, organisational and cultural challenges to successful e-mail management and longer-term curation.
The Long Wavelength Array Software Library
The Long Wavelength Array Software Library (LSL) is a Python module that
provides a collection of utilities to analyze and export data collected at the
first station of the Long Wavelength Array, LWA1. Due to the nature of the data
format and large-N (100 inputs) challenges faced by the LWA, currently
available software packages are not suited to process the data. Using tools
provided by LSL, observers can read in the raw LWA1 data, synthesize a filter
bank, and apply incoherent de-dispersion to the data. The extensible nature of
LSL also makes it an ideal tool for building data analysis pipelines and
applying the methods to other low frequency arrays.Comment: accepted to the Journal of Astronomical Instrumentation; 24 pages, 4
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Grids and the Virtual Observatory
We consider several projects from astronomy that benefit from the Grid paradigm and
associated technology, many of which involve either massive datasets or the federation
of multiple datasets. We cover image computation (mosaicking, multi-wavelength
images, and synoptic surveys); database computation (representation through XML,
data mining, and visualization); and semantic interoperability (publishing, ontologies,
directories, and service descriptions)
Addressing the challenge of managing large-scale digital multimedia libraries
Traditional Digital Libraries require human editorial control over the lifecycles of digital objects contained therein. This imposes an inherent (human) overhead on the maintenance of these digital libraries, which becomes unwieldy once the number of important information units in the digital library becomes too large. A revised framework is needed for digital libraries that takes the onus off the editor and allows the digital library to directly control digital object lifecycles, by employing a set of transformation rules that operate directly on the digital objects themselves. In this paper we motivate and describe a revised digital library framework that utilises transformation rules to automatically optimise system resources. We evaluate this library in three scenarios and also outline how we could apply concepts from this revised framework to address other challenges for digital libraries and digital information access in general
A Taxonomy of Data Grids for Distributed Data Sharing, Management and Processing
Data Grids have been adopted as the platform for scientific communities that
need to share, access, transport, process and manage large data collections
distributed worldwide. They combine high-end computing technologies with
high-performance networking and wide-area storage management techniques. In
this paper, we discuss the key concepts behind Data Grids and compare them with
other data sharing and distribution paradigms such as content delivery
networks, peer-to-peer networks and distributed databases. We then provide
comprehensive taxonomies that cover various aspects of architecture, data
transportation, data replication and resource allocation and scheduling.
Finally, we map the proposed taxonomy to various Data Grid systems not only to
validate the taxonomy but also to identify areas for future exploration.
Through this taxonomy, we aim to categorise existing systems to better
understand their goals and their methodology. This would help evaluate their
applicability for solving similar problems. This taxonomy also provides a "gap
analysis" of this area through which researchers can potentially identify new
issues for investigation. Finally, we hope that the proposed taxonomy and
mapping also helps to provide an easy way for new practitioners to understand
this complex area of research.Comment: 46 pages, 16 figures, Technical Repor
Access and usability issues of scholarly electronic publications
This chapter looks at the various access and usability issues related to scholarly information resources. It first looks at the various channels through which a user can get access to scholarly electronic publications. It then discusses the issues and studies surrounding usability. Some important parameters for measuring the usability of information access systems have been identified. Finally the chapter looks at the major problems facing the users in getting access to scholarly information through today's hybrid libraries, and mentions some possible measures to resolve these problems
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