The Astrolabe Project: Identifying and Curating Astronomical Dark Data through Development of Cyberinfrastructure Resources

TL;DR

The Astrolabe Project aims to identify, curate, and provide computational tools for uncurated astronomical dark data, enhancing data sharing and analysis in astronomy through cyberinfrastructure development.

Contribution

It introduces a collaborative cyberinfrastructure system for locating, ingesting, and sharing uncurated astronomical data, addressing a significant gap in data curation.

Findings

Development of automated methods for locating useful dark data

Active characterization of uncurated astronomical datasets

Engagement of user community for data management system

Abstract

As research datasets and analyses grow in complexity, data that could be valuable to other researchers and to support the integrity of published work remain uncurated across disciplines. These data are especially concentrated in the Long Tail of funded research, where curation resources and related expertise are often inaccessible. In the domain of astronomy, it is undisputed that uncurated dark data exist, but the scope of the problem remains uncertain. The Astrolabe Project is a collaboration between University of Arizona researchers, the CyVerse cyberinfrastructure environment, and American Astronomical Society, with a mission to identify and ingest previously-uncurated astronomical data, and to provide a robust computational environment for analysis and sharing of data, as well as services for authors wishing to deposit data associated with publications. Following expert feedback obtained through two workshops held in 2015 and 2016, Astrolabe is funded in part by National Science Foundation. The system is being actively developed within CyVerse, and Astrolabe collaborators are soliciting heterogeneous datasets and potential users for the prototype system. Astrolabe team members are currently working to characterize the properties of uncurated astronomical data, and to develop automated methods for locating potentially-useful data to be targeted for ingest into Astrolabe, while cultivating a user community for the new data management system.