| Abstract |
Virtual Observatories (hereafter VOs) in astronomy have been developed in many countries as a new research infrastructure in the 21st century, which is defined as “A collection of integrated astronomical data archives and software tools that utilize computer networks to create an environment in which research can be conducted” (http://www.encyclopedia.com/html/v1/virtobserv.asp).
The participating countries (VO projects) established a consortium, the International Virtual Observatory Alliance (IVOA; http://www.ivoa.net), to develop interoperable protocols for data discovery, data retrieval, data analysis, and others, where the most important functionality in VOs is data discovery – how to discover desired data that may be located somewhere in the world. Once a data provider (observatory, data center, and others) have implemented defined metadata and published them, those data can immediately be found from other researchers.
The ultimate purpose of the VOs is to obtain science results from large amount of data, multi-wavelength data, time-series of data, and others. Of course such research was possible in the past and even now, however, the process needed much man-power and long time. It can be found that the VO technologies can accelerate such studies very much that may enable us to conduct (real) statistical astronomical research.
In my lecture I will present fundamental structure to realize VOs, and
examples of science results by means of VOs, that are obtained by many
researchers (data scientists in astronomy) in the world. VOs may open a new
research paradigm in astronomy – Data Intensive Astronomy. |
