Alyssa Goodman edited results_interviews.tex  over 10 years ago

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\subsubsection{Generated output}  As with the previous question, the data products generated in the  context of different research endeavors, and their prodcution production  mechanisms, varied greatly between different projects. An  interviewee, for example, indicated that the source of their research  is entirely archival data and that the bulk of their research is 

\end{quote}  Despite the many types of data products generated, a visible thread of  similarity between responses can be found in the prominence of social and human factors involved in the production of these data products. Interviewees often reported that the various levels of data generated are entirely in the hands of  the people involved in the projects. An interviewee summarized the  prevalence of this practice as:  

photometric redshifts discussed earlier on were made available via dedicated services in  the Virtual Observatory (VO) framework (\url{http://www.usvao.org}). Using the VO means, in principle, that data can  be accessed, via the VO's "Registry," within a number of popular  astronomy applications. %shouldn't we say more The Virtual Observatory was established with a grant from the National Science Foundation in 2001, entitled "Building the Framework for the National Virtual Observatory." (See \url {http://virtualobservatory.org/whatis/history.aspx} for a history of the Virtual Observatory.) The grant essentially implemented a vision for sharing astronomy data online put forward in a \textit{Science} article  about VAO & non-maintenance "The WorldWide Telescope" by Gray and Szalay in 2001. \cite {http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2001Sci...293.2037S}. In 2010, NASA and NSF reached a cooperative agreement to fund and maintain a "Virtual Astronomical Observatory," implementing the research done under the 2001 "Framework" grant as a working online "Observatory." In 2012, NSF announced plans (now being implemented) to de-fund its (80%) share  of Registry here, the US VAO. Opinions on why  and elsewhere--we how this happened are beyond the scope of this paper. We only comment here that the VAO may  have been a bit too early in assuming that all astronomers were going  to acknowledge long history appreciate its mission. What is important for our purposes is to point out that even the most robust and important infrastructure-related efforts  of VAO the VAO, like the VO "Registry" essential  for its role tools to find data, are not at all secure from funding cuts--and this can put doubt in the minds of astronomers thinking about doing extra work to share their data.     In 2008, Microsoft Research released a free software package named "WorldWide Telescope" (WWT),  in current honor of Szalay and Gray's 2001 vision. Today, WWT, which uses a large amount of infrastructure established under the NVO and VAO grants, and connects to many services developed outside the US (under the "International Virtual Observatory Alliance" standards) is probably the best implementation of the Virtual Observatory vision. Many data sets from NASA and other large survey providers are available within WWT, and astronomers can offer their own  data use practices, or we will look stupid? in WWT frameworks as well, but uptake is still slower than one might imagine. An example of a medium-size survey being served at a group "tilde" web site using an HTML5 WWT client is at \url {http://www.worldwidetelescope.org/complete/wwtcoveragetool5.htm}. A summary of WWT usage and functionality is offered in \citet {http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2012ASPC..461..267G).  \subsubsection{Data citation}