The DAME/VO-Neural Infrastructure: an Integrated Data Mining System Support for the Science Community

TL;DR

The paper presents the DAME/VO-Neural infrastructure, a web-based, distributed data mining system designed to integrate heterogeneous astronomical data repositories and services across organizations using standards and Grid paradigms.

Contribution

It introduces a novel service-oriented architecture that integrates distributed systems and standards for efficient data mining in massive, heterogeneous astronomical datasets.

Findings

Developed a web application for data mining in astronomy

Achieved integration of heterogeneous data repositories

Implemented standards-compliant, distributed computing framework

Abstract

Astronomical data are gathered through a very large number of heterogeneous techniques and stored in very diversified and often incompatible data repositories. Moreover in the e-science environment, it is needed to integrate services across distributed, heterogeneous, dynamic "virtual organizations" formed by different resources within a single enterprise and/or external resource sharing and service provider relationships. The DAME/VONeural project, run jointly by the University Federico II, INAF (National Institute of Astrophysics) Astronomical Observatories of Napoli and the California Institute of Technology, aims at creating a single, sustainable, distributed e-infrastructure for data mining and exploration in massive data sets, to be offered to the astronomical (but not only) community as a web application. The framework makes use of distributed computing environments (e.g. S.Co.P.E.) and matches the international IVOA standards and requirements. The integration process is technically challenging due to the need of achieving a specific quality of service when running on top of different native platforms. In these terms, the result of the DAME/VO-Neural project effort will be a service-oriented architecture, obtained by using appropriate standards and incorporating Grid paradigms and restful Web services frameworks where needed, that will have as main target the integration of interdisciplinary distributed systems within and across organizational domains.