AstroShelf: Understanding the Universe Through Scalable Navigation of a Galaxy of AnnotationsScreenshot from AstroShelf’s User Interface, currently showing the SkyView (left) and the Live Annotations View (right). - Panayiotis Neophytou, University of Pittsburgh
Authors: Neophytou, P., Gheorghiu, R., Hachey, R., Luciani, T., Sun, B., Labrinidis, A., Marai, G. E., Chrysanthis, P. K.
Publication: SIGMOD 2012 System Demonstrations Compendium, Scottsdale, AZ, pp. 1-4 This demo presents AstroShelf, our on-going effort to enable astrophysicists to collaboratively investigate celestial objects using data originating from multiple sky surveys, hosted at different sites. The AstroShelf platform combines database and data stream, workflow and visualization technologies to provide a means for querying and displaying telescope images (in a Google Sky manner), visualizations of spectrum data, and for managing annotations. In addition to the user interface, AstroShelf supports a programmatic interface (available as a web service), which allows astrophysicists to incorporate functionality from AstroShelf in their own programs. A key feature is Live Annotations which is the detection and delivery of events or annotations to users in real-time, based on their profiles. We demonstrate the capabilities of AstroShelf through real end user exploration scenarios (with participation from “stargazers” in the audience), in the presence of simulated annotation workloads executed through web services. Categories and Subject Descriptors: H.2.8 [DATABASE MANAGEMENT]: Database Applications- Scientific databases; H.3.5 [INFORMATION STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL]: Online Information Services-Data Sharing, Web-Based Services Keywords: Big Data, Scientific Databases, Continuous Workflows, Annotations, Visualization, Astronomy Date: May 20, 2012 - May 24, 2012 Document: View PDF |