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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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