ASTROGRID-2 : Lifetime Plan

Part-B : Vision

The Virtual Observatory (VO) vision

The power of the World Wide Web is its transparency - it feels as if all the documents in the world are inside your PC. The idea of the Virtual Observatory (VO) is to achieve the same transparency for astronomical data. All the world's data on your desk - all archives speaking the same language, accessed through a uniform interface, and analysable by the same tools. The world-wide super archive becomes the sky, and software the instrument with which we collect data from the sky - hence the metaphor of the Virtual Observatory. The VO concept can be seen as an example of a data grid. However it goes one step further, as what is offered is not just access to the data, but operations on the data and returned results which are essential for their full exploitation - for example the ability to visualise results, to stack and mosaic images, to query catalogues and create subsets, to integrate data from different origins, or to calculate a correlation function. Such calculations will be data services offered by the expert data centres holding the data. They will be standardised to be compatible across many archives. The result is a service grid. The VO will not be a monolithic system, but, like the Web, a set of standards which make all the components of the system interoperable - data and metadata standards, agreed protocols and methods, and standardised mix-and-match software components. These standards and software modules constitute the VO Framework. To achieve the whole vision, however, data centres, tools writers, and facility builders will all work within this framework.

The AstroGrid vision

Our vision is twofold : to provide a generic infrastructure for the world; and to build a specific deployment for UK astronomy.

AstroGrid is committed to the open framework approach for the VO. The first part of the AstroGrid vision is to build the infrastructure that will make this possible. As well as open standards, this means specific software components which implement those standards. We aim to make our infrastructure available worldwide, by constructing software components that are mix-and-match, and as far as possible plug-and-play, so that they can easily be used with other products from around the world. We therefore aim to build to a high standard of software engineering and documentation.

The second part of the AstroGrid vision is to deliver a working system of daily use to UK astronomers. To achieve this, we will deploy our own infrastructure components at data centres in the UK, work with our colleagues at those data centres, and will integrate tools and applications emerging from the UK and elsewhere.

AstroGrid-2

The original AstroGrid project, as well as sharing the work of developing the key international standards, has succeeded in developing most of the core infrastructure components that make the AstroGrid vision possible - Registry, Virtual Storage, Workflow, Common Execution Architecture, Community, Portal, and Query Builder. However, the deployment was only experimental; tools and applications provided were limited; and developing technologies mean that the infrastructure itself could become much more powerful and flexible. The AstroGrid-2 vision is therefore to complete and extend the original AstroGrid vision. The key components are to complete a full deployment, to deploy a wide range of tools and applications, to develop a framework for ambitious datamining work, and to research and deploy new infrastructural technologies, such as ontology and agents.

-- AndyLawrence - 02 May 2005