SkyPortal: An Astronomical Data Platform

The Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series, 2018

The American Astronomical Society's WorldWide Telescope (WWT) project enables terabytes of astronomical images, data, and stories to be viewed and shared among researchers, exhibited in science museums, projected into full-dome immersive planetariums and virtual reality headsets, and taught in classrooms from middle school to college levels. We review the WWT ecosystem, how WWT has been used in the astronomical community, and comment on future directions.

The European Southern Observatory operates four geographically separated sites, the headquarters in Germany and an office and two observatories at separate remote locations in Chile. Staff astronomers, fellows, students and visitors are active at all four sites and need appropriate software tools. In the past these requirements were addressed by local computer management staff in response to requests. This resulted in different tools being available at different sites, often in different versions and with different levels of support. These differences often resulted in inconvenience, particularly for visitors. In an attempt to address these problems a project called ``Scisoft" was established within ESO. Scisoft has put together a standardized collection of software in three versions covering the supported computer platforms within the organization - Solaris, HP-UX and Linux. The contents of the collection are determined by the demands of users at all sites and standardized for...

2002

The mining of Virtual Observatories (VOs) is becoming a powerful new method for discovery in astronomy. Here we report on the development of SkyDOT (Sky Database for Objects in the Time domain), a new Virtual Observatory, which is dedicated to the study of sky variability. The site will confederate a number of massive variability surveys and enable exploration of the time domain in astronomy. We discuss the architecture of the database and the functionality of the user interface. An important aspect of SkyDOT is that it is continuously updated in near real time so that users can access new observations in a timely manner. The site will also utilize high level machine learning tools that will allow sophisticated mining of the archive. Another key feature is the real time data stream provided by RAPTOR (RAPid Telescopes for Optical Response), a new sky monitoring experiment under construction at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL).

2008

We present a new software solution, based on Java, which allows to deploy and access astronomical catalogs in relational database form, with their associated data products. It is already used to provide the public VVDS data via VO and manage zCosmos data within the Italian COSMOS community; it is also used as the second generation Web interface to the XMM-LSS master catalog. DART (Database Access and Retrieval Tool) supplies a Web interface which allows to query catalogs, filter data by conditions on the columns values (even complex expressions), view the results and export them in private user files; it is also possible to make simple plots or retrieve the related data products. The software supports access to more than one catalog at a time (e.g. for multi-band usage) either in parallel, or as a couple linked by pre-built correlation tables, or even viewing the result of an identification among several catalogs as a single virtual table. DART has been designed as a general tool capable of accessing any collection of astronomical database tables and related products. It is highly (and easily) customizable editing simple configuration files and (for an increased flexibility specially concerning data product access) populating appropriately a few administrative database tables. It supports ConeSearch, SSA and SIA Virtual Observatory protocols. DART will be soon released to the astronomical community from the PANDORA Web site

TeraGrid Conference, 2006

The creation of large digital sky surveys presents the astronomy community with tremendous scientific opportunities. However, these astronomy datasets are generally terabytes in size and contain hundreds of millions of objects separated into millions of files—factors that make many analyses impractical to perform on small computers. To address this problem, we have developed a Web Services-based system, AstroPortal, that uses grid computing to federate large computing and storage resources for dynamic analysis of ...

Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, 2011

This paper presents a newly developed WWW environment called VisIVOWeb aiming at providing the astrophysical community with powerful visualization tools for large-scale datasets in the context of Web 2.0. VisIVOWeb can handle effectively modern numerical simulations and real-world observations. Our software is open-source based on established visualization toolkits and offers high quality rendering algorithms. The underlying data management is discussed together with the supported visualization interfaces and movie making functionality. We introduce VisIVOWeb Network, a robust network of customized web portals for visual discovery and VisIVOWeb Connect, a lightweight and efficient solution for seamlessly connecting to existing astrophysical archives. A significant effort has been devoted for ensuring interoperability with existing tools by adhering to IVOA standards. We conclude with a summary of our work and a discussion on future developments.

Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, 2007

In this paper we show how advanced visualization tools can help the researcher in investigating and extracting information from data. The focus is on VisIVO, a novel open source graphics application, which blends high performance multidimensional visualization techniques and up-to-date technologies to cooperate with other applications and to access remote, distributed data archives. VisIVO supports the standards defined by the International Virtual Observatory Alliance in order to make it interoperable with VO data repositories. The paper describes the basic technical details and features of the software and it dedicates a large section to show how VisIVO can be used in several scientific cases.

2012

Filtergraph is a web application being developed by the Vanderbilt Initiative in Data-intensive Astrophysics (VIDA) to flexibly handle a large variety of astronomy datasets. While current datasets at Vanderbilt are being used to search for eclipsing binaries and extrasolar planets, this system can be easily reconfigured for a wide variety of data sources. The user loads a flat-file dataset into Filtergraph which instantly generates an interactive data portal that can be easily shared with others. From this portal, the user can immediately generate scatter plots, histograms, and tables based on the dataset. Key features of the portal include the ability to filter the data in real time through user-specified criteria, the ability to select data by dragging on the screen, and the ability to perform arithmetic operations on the data in real time. The application is being optimized for speed in the context of very large datasets: for instance, plot generated from a stellar database of 3.1 million entries render in less than 2 seconds on a standard web server platform. This web application has been created using the Web2py web framework based on the Python programming language. Filtergraph is freely available at http://filtergraph.vanderbilt.edu/.

Filtergraph is a web application being developed and maintained by the Vanderbilt Initiative in Data-intensive Astrophysics (VIDA) to flexibly and rapidly visualize a large variety of astronomy datasets of various formats and sizes. The user loads a flat-file dataset into Filtergraph which automatically generates an interactive data portal that can be easily shared with others. From this portal, the user can immediately generate scatter plots of up to 5 dimensions as well as histograms and tables based on the dataset. Key features of the portal include intuitive controls with auto-completed variable names, the ability to filter the data in real time through user-specified criteria, the ability to select data by dragging on the screen, and the ability to perform arithmetic operations on the data in real time. To enable seamless data visualization and exploration, changes are quickly rendered on screen and visualizations can be exported as high quality graphics files. The application ...

Astronomy and Computing

The visual inspection of image and catalog data continues to be a valuable aspect of astronomical data analysis. As the scale of astronomical image and catalog data continues to grow, visualizing the data becomes increasingly difficult. In this work, we introduce FitsMap, a simple, lightweight tool for visualizing astronomical image and catalog data. FitsMap only requires a simple web server and can scale to over gigapixel images with tens of millions of sources. Further, the web-based visualizations can be viewed performantly on mobile devices. FitsMap is implemented in Python and is open source (https://github.com/ryanhausen/fitsmap).