Synopsis

For astronomy, there are 3 distinct models for a cyberinfrastructure.

The first is NASA's Extragalactic DB (NED) which is an older model that compiles numbers and names from the scientific literature. It uses a traditional database and presents data to the user in a traditional format. In most respects, this project is bottom up.

The second is the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, a more top down approach which compiles data from a single observing instrument (more or less). What's interesting about this project is that it is managed, complete with a scientific council and spokesperson, governing body, and publication policy.

Finally, there is a secular project run by Google with help from the University of Washington. It is an exemplar in display esp. to the lay public. It's highly decentralized and combines data from many, many sources to bring together a single "view" of the sky.

Notes for Linguistics

• assume a rich set of underlying data
• create something like WALS
• "show an example (all resources) for a particular language group"
• if linguists dont' do it, someone will!
  

Nasa Extragalactic Database NED

An older data exchange database is the Nasa Extragalactic Database NED, which can be found at: http://nedwww.ipac.caltech.edu/> This site compiles numbers in the literature, and they later added images. The results were non-uniform, in the sense that different Astronomers were reporting different numbers
(brightnesses) for the same objects in the sky. NED is really just a simple database accessed
via HTML.

The contents of the DB:

	Interface last updated: 2 June 2009 163 million objects 170 million multiwavelength object cross-IDs 638 thousand associations (candidate cross-IDs) 1.5 million redshifts 1.7 billion photometric measurements 609 million diameter measurements	Database last updated: 2 June 2009 5.1 million objects linked to 71,596 journal articles 2.3 million images, maps and external links 56,405 spectra 18,150 redshift-independent distances for 5,049 galaxies 64,956 object notes 48,661 journal article abstracts

Sloan Digital Sky Survey

In an attempt to add some uniformity, the astronomy community created the Sloan
Digital Sky Survey: http://www.sdss.org/ This has a more complicated, detailed, and
exploratory nature to the project. Instead of combining data from different astronomers
at different telescopes, they just built their own telescope and camera, took their own
data, cataloged everything, and made the cataloged numbers and data available for
everybody. One catalog is in MySQL format, where catalog numbers can be found here:
http://cas.sdss.org/astrodr7/en/ "click on the *SQL search* link for example"
Data, in the format of FITS images and FITS spectra, can be found here: http://das.sdss.org/www/html/
or: http://cas.sdss.org/astrodr7/en/tools/getimg/ It is all open to the public, and has produced a
lot of science using a small telescope in New Mexico.

Facets of the enterprise:

150 scientists took part (contributed data)
230 million celestial objects
collaboration council
scientific spokesperson
collaboration policy, including a publication policy

Google Sky

Google Sky combines data from different observatories. It provides a very user friendly, visually pleasing, and
scientifically accurate way to access data from world-class observatories such as the Hubble Space Telescope, GALEX space-base Ultraviolet observatory, the Chandra space-based X-ray observatory, and others.

The imagery for Google Sky comes from some of the largest ground- and space-based astronomical surveys. The visible data comes from a combination of surveys: the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, the Digital Sky Survey Consortium which you can find more about at: http://www.stsci.edu, http://www.caltech.edu, http://www.roe.ac.uk, and http://www.aao.gov.au; NASA and ESA's Hubble Space Telescope about which you can find more at the Space Telescope Science Institute and the ESA Hubble Space Telescope home page. More details about these observatories can be found on our partners page. Additional layers for Sky came from a number of space orbiting observatories: the x-ray data from NASA's Chandra satellite, the ultraviolet images from NASA's GALEX satellite, the infrared images from the joint NASA, Netherlands and UK Infrared Astronomical Satellite (IRAS) and the microwave sky from NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) satellite. The historical constellations layer are created from the historical maps available at the David Rumsey Historical Maps Collection. The layers were created in collaboration with the University of Washington sky team .