Science with VO tools: the AstroGrid VO Desktop (original) (raw)
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Science with the Virtual Observatory: the AstroGrid VO Desktop
2009
) and show how to pass the various results into any VO enabled tool such as TopCat for catalogue correlation. VOExplorer offers a powerful data-centric visualisation for browsing and filtering the entire VO registry using an iTunes type interface. This allows the user to bookmark their own personalised lists of resources and to run tasks on the selected resources as desired. We introduce an example of how more advanced querying can be performed to access existing X-ray cluster of galaxies catalogues and then select extended only X-ray sources as candidate clusters of galaxies in the 2XMMi catalogue. Finally we introduce scripted access to VO resources using python with AstroGrid and demonstrate how the user can pass on the results of such a search and correlate with e.g. optical datasets such as Sloan. Hence we illustrate the power of enabling large scale data mining of multi wavelength resources in an easily reproducible way using the VO.
VOExplorer: Visualising Data Discovery in the Virtual Observatory
2008
The UK AstroGrid project has developed the VOExplorer interface to the VO as part of its forthcoming Desktop suite of applications. VOExplorer offers a powerful data-centric visualisation for browsing and filtering the entire VO registry using an iTunes type interface. We demonstrate how this allows the user to bookmark their own personalised lists of resources and to run tasks on the selected resources as desired. Thus VOExplorer significantly simplifies returning relevant data to queries such as “find me all extended X-ray sources in the 2XMM catalog”, and then export to a new catalogue or “find me all optical, near-IR and X-ray catalogued objects within 0.1 arcmins of a new transient Gamma Ray Burst (GRB) event” and now even “find me all transient events from e.g. GCN, IAU alerts previously recorded for this search radius”. HelioScope similarly searches solar archives within a given time interval. We demonstrate how the user is then offered the opportunity to process and act on t...
AstroGrid: the UK's Virtual Observatory Initiative
… Data Analysis Software and Systems XI, 2002
AstroGrid is the UK's Virtual Observatory (VO) initiative. It brings together the principal astronomical data centres in the UK, and has been funded to the tune of ∼£5M over the next three years, via PPARC, as part of the UK e-science programme. Its twin goals are the provision of the infrastructure and tools for the federation and exploitation of large astronomical (X-ray to radio), solar and space plasma physics datasets, and the delivery of federations of current datasets for its user communities to exploit using those tools.
VisIVO: A Tool for the Virtual Observatory and Grid Environment
2007
We present the new features of VisIVO, software for the visualization and analysis of astrophysical data which can be retrieved from the Virtual Observatory framework and used for cosmological simulations running both on Windows and GNU/Linux platforms. VisIVO is VO standards compliant and supports the most important astronomical data formats such as FITS, HDF5 and VOTables. It is free software
VisIVO–Integrated Tools and Services for Large-Scale Astrophysical Visualization
Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, 2010
VisIVO is an integrated suite of tools and services specifically designed for the Virtual Observatory. This suite constitutes a software framework for effective visual discovery in currently available (and next-generation) very large-scale astrophysical datasets. VisIVO consists of VisiVO Desktop -a stand alone application for interactive visualization on standard PCs, VisIVO Server -a grid-enabled platform for high performance visualization and VisIVO Web -a custom designed web portal supporting services based on the VisIVO Server functionality. The main characteristic of VisIVO is support for high-performance, multidimensional visualization of very large-scale astrophysical datasets. Users can obtain meaningful visualizations rapidly while preserving full and intuitive control of the relevant visualization parameters. This paper focuses on newly developed integrated tools in VisIVO Server allowing intuitive visual discovery with 3D views being created from data tables. VisIVO Server can be installed easily on any web server with a database repository. We discuss briefly aspects of our implementation of VisiVO Server on a computational grid and also outline the functionality of the services offered by VisIVO Web. Finally we conclude with a summary of our work and pointers to future developments.
The knowledge discovery potential of the new large astronomical databases is vast. When these are used in conjunction with the rich legacy data archives, the opportunities for scientific discovery multiply rapidly. A Virtual Observatory (VO) framework will enable transparent and efficient access, search, retrieval, and visualization of data across multiple data repositories, which are generally heterogeneous and distributed. Aspects of data mining that apply to a variety of science user scenarios with a VO are reviewed. The development of a VO should address the data mining needs of various astronomical research constituencies. By way of example, two user scenarios are presented which invoke applications and linkages of data across the catalog and image domains in order to address specific astrophysics research problems. These illustrate a subset of the desired capabilities and power of the VO, and as such they represent potential components of a VO Design Reference Mission.
arXiv: Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics, 2020
We report the outcomes of a survey that explores the current practices, needs and expectations of the astrophysics community, concerning four research aspects: open science practices, data access and management, data visualization, and data analysis. The survey, involving 329 professionals from several research institutions, pinpoints significant gaps in matters such as results reproducibility, availability of visual analytics tools and adoption of Machine Learning techniques for data analysis. This research is conducted in the context of the H2020 NEANIAS project.
AstroPortal: a science gateway for large-scale astronomy data analysis
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 ...
Visualization, Exploration, and Data Analysis of Complex Astrophysical Data
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.
Scisoft -- A Collection of Astronomical Software for ESO Users
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...