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Paper: VO for Education: Archive Prototype
Volume: 485, Astronomical Data Analysis Software and Systems XXIII
Page: 317
Authors: Ramella, M.; Iafrate, G.; De Marco, M.; Molinaro, M.; Knapic, C.; Smareglia, R.; Cepparo, F.
Abstract: The number of remote control telescopes dedicated to education is increasing in many countries, leading to correspondingly larger and larger amount of stored educational data that are usually available only to local observers. Here we present the project for a new infrastructure that will allow teachers using educational telescopes to archive their data and easily publish them within the Virtual Observatory (VO) avoiding the complexity of professional tools. Students and teachers anywhere will be able to access these data with obvious benefits for the realization of grander scale collaborative projects. Educational VO data will also be an important resource for teachers not having direct access to any educational telescopes. We will use the educational telescope at our observatory in Trieste as a prototype for the future VO educational data archive resource. The publishing infrastructure will include: user authentication, content and curation validation, data validation and ingestion, VO compliant resource generation. All of these parts will be performed by means of server side applications accessible through a web graphical user interface (web GUI). Apart from user registration, that will be validated by a natural person responsible for the archive (after having verified the reliability of the user and inspected one or more test files), all the subsequent steps will be automated. This means that at the very first data submission through the webGUI, a complete resource including archive and published VO service will be generated, ready to be registered to the VO. The efforts required to the registered user will consist only in describing herself/himself at registration step and submitting the data she/he selects for publishing after each observation sessions. The infrastructure will be file format independent and the underlying data model will use a minimal set of standard VO keywords, some of which will be specific for outreach and education, possibly including VO field identification (astronomy, planetary science, solar physics). The VO published resource description will be suggested such as to allow selective access to educational data by VO aware tools, differentiating them from professional data while treating them with the same procedures, protocols and tools. The whole system will be very flexible, scalable and with the objective to leave as less work as possible to humans.
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