:: The Virtual Observatory as a Semantic
and a Computational Grid
Roy Williams
California Institute of Technology
co-Director, US National Virtual Observatory
Data and computing are becoming essential tools in astronomy,
and archive-based research is growing, especially through federation
of different datasets. The Virtual Observatory movement is represented
through many national initiatives, coordinated through an international
alliance (ivoa.net), and first fruits are appearing.
Diversity of data sources is tackled by setting up a flexible
registry structure, by standards for data representation, by standard
abstract web services, and by a semantically meaningful controlled
vocabulary.
For bulk data, massive computation is needed for mining and for
making derivative data products; an example of the latter is multi-wavelength
image stacking. The Atlasmaker project is building a virtual data
pipeline on Teragrid to facilitate research in this new view of
the Universe.
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