We review some aspects of the current state of data-intensive astronomy, its
methods, and some outstanding data analysis challenges. Astronomy is at the
forefront of "big data" science, with exponentially growing data volumes and
data rates, and an ever-increasing complexity, now entering the Petascale
regime. Telescopes and observatories from both ground and space, covering a
full range of wavelengths, feed the data via processing pipelines into
dedicated archives, where they can be accessed for scientific analysis. Most of
the large archives are connected through the Virtual Observatory framework,
that provides interoperability standards and services, and effectively
constitutes a global data grid of astronomy. Making discoveries in this
overabundance of data requires applications of novel, machine learning tools.
We describe some of the recent examples of such applications.Comment: Keynote talk in the proceedings of ESA-ESRIN Conference: Big Data
from Space 2014, Frascati, Italy, November 12-14, 2014, 8 pages, 2 figure
