The Astro-Wise System: A Federated Information Accumulator for Astronomy- I

Much of modern research involves the
accumulation of huge amounts of digitized
data. The analysis of this data by
distributed communities represents a significant
challenge to project management
and ICT implementation, and is
relevant to fields as diverse as biology,
physics, astronomy, economics and cultural
heritage projects. Furthermore, the
projects are often global efforts requiring
collaborators in many places to share,
validate and combine processed data and
derived results. It is therefore necessary
to develop more efficient data lineage,
mining and analysis systems to allow
researchers to search intelligently
through previously unmanageable volumes
of data.
The Astro-Wise consortium has developed
an information system to meet these
challenges for wide-field imaging in
astronomy. The Astro-Wise consortium is
a partnership between OmegaCENNOVA/
Kapteyn Institute (Groningen,
The Netherlands; coordinator),
Osservatorio Astronomico di
Capodimonte (Naples, Italy),
Terapix at IAP (Paris, France),
ESO, Universitäts-Sternwarte &
Max-Planck Institut für
Extraterrestrische Physik
(Munich, Germany).
Large data projects in highenergy
physics, space missions
and astronomy typically push
data through various platforms
in an irreversible way (eg a
TIER node setting). In such a situation,
the end user has little or
no influence on what happens
upstream. This ‘classical’
paradigm is characterized by
fixed ‘releases’ of homogeneous,
well-documented data
products. In contrast, the Astro-
Wise system allows the end user to trace
the data product, following all its dependencies
up to the raw observational data
and, if necessary, to re-derive the result
with better calibration data and/or
improved methods.