Virtual Repository Progress Lars Lindberg Christensen (ESA/ESO)

Programme Group Virtual Repository under the IAU Working Group Communicating Astronomy The goal: “To construct the framework for a virtual repository to allow outreach resources across projects and country borders to be ‘catalogued’ in a virtual repository and accessed by communicators, educators, press, students and public through specialized visual tools combined with search engines.”

The problem The volume of astronomical data is exploding (VOs) In VO EPO we ultimately would like to give access to real data in a “Digital Universe”, but this is a major undertaking Complex datasets Raw data are ‘dirty’ Laypeople and teachers lack the background to understand many of the issues Meanwhile, the volume of digital products (outreach images and videos) is all the time increasing As a first step how do we better share resources internally? Ultimately, how do we allow the public better access to images, videos and other materials? Astro-Google?

How do we solve this problem? Very similar problems as the VOs are struggling with now => learn from them, compatible with VOs We can not realistically hope to standardise the archives A Programme Group called Virtual Repository under the IAU Working Group Communicating Astronomy has been set up Goal: “To construct the framework for a virtual repository to allow outreach resources across projects and country borders to be ‘catalogued’ in a virtual repository and accessed by educators, press, students and public through specialized visual tools combined with search engines.”

Some repositories Educational portal NASA Space Science - The Space Science Education Resource Directory - PHYSICAL Vortal AthenaWeb – VIRTUAL

Implementation Central coordinating organisation: IAU WG on Communicating Astronomy? Metadata tags with the pixels (in for instance XML format added with the FITS Liberator) List of Data Holdings (dynamic): yellow pages, Registries that contain metadata about data resources and information services Communication between user and data holding – for instance through the Registry with the help of a VO- style Data Access Layer, such as the Simple Image Access Protocol (SIAP)

Funding –EU’s eContentplus programme? –A multiannual Community programme to make digital content in Europe more accessible, usable and exploitable. –“The Programme addresses specific market areas where development has been slow: geographic content (as a key constituent of public sector content), educational content, cultural, scientific and scholarly content. The Programme also supports EU-wide co-ordination of collections in libraries, museums and archives and the preservation of digital collections so as to ensure availability of cultural, scholarly and scientific assets for future use.”

Members –Content providers (observatories, VOs etc.) –Educators –Visualizers

Collaborators –NASA’s Virtual Cosmos programme: Nahide Craig –NASA Explorer Institutes’ Focus Group Seeing The Universe –NVO EPO: –

This meeting Soliciting community inputs – Come & discuss these issues! Join the Metadata Lunch Meeting Thursday 12:45 Will report on the progress of this work Friday 15:00