Jim
Gray
Microsoft
Corporation
On-Line
Science:
The
World-Wide
Telescope
as
a
Prototype
for
the
new
Computational
Science
Abstract: Computational
science
has
historically
meant
simulation,
but there
is
an
increasing
role
for
analysis
and
mining
of
online
scientific
data.
As
a
case
in
point,
half
of
the
world's
astronomy
data
is
public.
The
astronomy
community
is
putting
all
that
data
on
the
Internet
so
that
the
Internet
becomes
the
world's
best
telescope:
it
has
the
whole
sky,
in
many
bands,
and
in
detail
as
good
as
the
best
2-year-old
telescopes.
It
is
useable
by
all
astronomers
everywhere.
This is the vision of the Virtual Observatory — also called the World Wide Telescope (WWT). As one step along that path I have been working with the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and CalTech to federate their data in web services on the Internet, and to make it easy to ask questions of the database (see skyserver.sdss.org and skyquery.net).
This talk explains the rationale for the WWT, discusses how we designed the database, and talks about some data mining tasks. It also describes computer science challenges of publishing, federating, and mining scientific data, and argues that XML web services are key to federating diverse data sources.
Biography: Jim Gray is part of Microsoft's research group. His work focuses on databases and transaction processing. Jim is active in the research community, is an ACM, NAE, NAS, and AAAS Fellow, and received the ACM Turing Award for his work on transaction processing. He edits of a series of books on data management, and has been active in building online databases like TerraService.Net and skyserver.sdss.org.