August Muench edited discussion.tex  over 10 years ago

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\section{Discussion}  With this study we found that, overall, astronomers are increasingly willing to reference and share the secondary or processed data sets used to derive the results in their publications. However, these same astronomers have failed to embrace  a common infrastructure to share these types of data sets is sets,  either because such infrastructure is  lacking or because  it is unknown to most astronomers. [\textbf{From Merce: I'm (or untenable as  a bit confused about the meaning of this sentence, having said that this is unknown to solution for)  most astronomers.}] But anyone with a minimum knowledge of astronomy knows that such common infrastructure is not lacking. As a matter of fact, astronomers. Interestingly,  astronomy, as a field, has pioneered \textbf{pioneered}  the creation of international initiatives for the collection, organization, and sharing of data. This embracing of such a "virtual observatory" for astronomy is over a decade old, yet it's failure to provide a clearinghouse as a data sharing solution is worth a deeper discussion.  The Virtual Observatory was Focusing on efforts in the United States to facilitate a 'virtual observatory', we note that the 2000 decadal review of the National Research Council called for the creation of a "National Virtual Observatory" as its highest small initiatives priority. were  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 US  Virtual Observatory.) Observatory efforts.)  The grant essentially implemented a vision for sharing astronomy data online put forward in a \textit{Science} article about "The WorldWide Telescope" by Szalay and Gray in 2001. \cite {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. The concept of a Virtual Observatory is well ingrained in the mind of all astronomers as well as that of most scientists and science experts. Yet, this study finds that there has been very little uptake of the tools that have been created under the umbrella of the Virtual Observatory. It is safe to state that the vision that the VO will provide a "virtual sky based on the enormous data sets being created now and the even larger ones proposed for the future" that could "enable a new mode of research for professional astronomers and will provide to the public an unparalleled opportunity for education and discovery" \cite{vobook} was not met. It is not surprising that in 2012, NSF announced plans (now being implemented) to de-fund its (80\%) share of the US VAO. Opinions on why and how this happened are beyond the scope of this paper. What is important for our purposes is to point out that even the most robust, important and adopted infrastructure-related efforts of the VAO, like the VO "Registry" essential for 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 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 US-origin implementation of the Virtual Observatory vision. The combination of tools offered by the Centre de Donnees astronomiques de Strasbourg (CDS; \url {http://cds.u-strasbg.fr}) also offer excellent access to VO services. Many data sets from NASA and other large survey providers are available within WWT and CDS tools, and astronomers can offer their own data in these frameworks as well, but uptake is still slower than one might imagine. An example of a medium-size survey (COMPLETE; see \url {http://www.cfa.harvard.edu/COMPLETE/data_html_pages/data.html}) being served at a research group's web site using an HTML5 WWT client is at \url {http://www.worldwidetelescope.org/complete/wwtcoveragetool5.htm}. A summary of the usage and functionality of WWT in research and education is offered in \citet {2012ASPC..461..267G}.