The Variable Star One-shot Project, and its little child: Wikimbad

TL;DR

The paper presents the Variable Star One-shot Project (VSOP), an automated, collaborative effort to obtain and analyze spectra of unstudied variable stars, and introduces Wikimbad, a platform for sharing astronomical data.

Contribution

It introduces a new automated observational model for variable star spectra collection and a collaborative wiki platform, Wikimbad, for sharing astronomical data.

Findings

VSOP successfully automates spectral data collection and analysis.

Wikimbad enhances data sharing and organization in astronomy.

The collaborative model fosters worldwide participation.

Abstract

The Variable Star One-shot Project (VSOP) aimed at providing to the world-wide stellar community the necessary one-shot spectrum of unstudied variable stars, too often classified as such by an analysis of photometric data only. The VSOP has established an new kind of observational model, where all steps from observations to spectral analysis, are automatized (or are underway to be fully automatized). The project is centralized on a collaborative wiki website. The VSOP operational model is very successful, data is continously flowing and being analyszed, and VSOP is now a worldwide open collaboration of people with very different and complementary skills and expertise. The idea of a central wiki website has been extended by one of us to propose a new service to the whole astronomical community, called Wikimbad. Wikimbad is an open wiki website aimed at collecting, organizing and making publicly available all kind of reduced and published astronomical data. Its strengths and a comparison with the Virtual Observatory are discussed. See: http://vsop.sc.eso.org and http://wikimbad.org