or
Bob Mann
Institute for Astronomy and NeSC
University of Edinburgh

My background
Duties of a NeSC Research Leader
Some of my highlights from the year
Astronomical testbed for edikt’s BinX project
Scientific Data Mining, Integration & Visualization
Sky Survey Database Design
Virtual Observatory as a Data Grid
Conclusions from the year

“Generalist” astronomer
Theory and observations
X-ray, optical, infrared, submillimetre, radio
Formation/evolution of galaxies & clusters of galaxies
Member of Wide Field Astronomy Unit
Home of UK’s largest sky survey databases
Member of AstroGrid team
UK contribution to building an international Virtual Observatory

encouraging the uptake of Grid technologies in
Astronomy and related fields encouraging visitors , with whom you have a research overlap, to visit Edinburgh and work with you and other local colleagues organising and running research workshops assisting with the development of new core Grid and scientific database technologies promoting NeSC within the Universities of Edinburgh and
Glasgow through, for example, personal presentations and more widely at conferences and workshops.
…and all that in 0.5 FTE!

What is BinX?
edikt project see www.edikt.org/binx download BinX v1.0!
XML language description of binary data files library of tools for manipulating files
Why BinX and astronomy?
Two main data formats for tabular data:
X
VOTable (XML) and FITS binary tables
XML good for interoperability and transformation, but verbose & lots of legacy data in FITS files
Want FITS some of the time & VOTable the rest

VOTable FITS conversion with BinX it works! - some performance improvements desirable
(use SAX, not DOM) workable solution for astronomy & proof of concept for edikt
Possible extensions to BinX data extraction from binary files with XPath 1.0?
delivering SAX events from binary files to apps?
closer integration with databases - ELDAS?
RL time significantly improved interaction
Science drivers for GGF DFDL WG

Two-day workshop in October 2002
Focus for visit by Roy Williams (Caltech)
Fifty attendees astronomy, atmospheric science, bioinformatics, chemistry, digital libraries, engineering, environmental science, experimental physics, marine sciences, oceanography, and statistics…plus
CS and software engineers
Report [UKeS-2002-06] with 12 recommendations
R5. A mechanism should be sought whereby the peer-reviewed publication of datasets can be made part of the standard scientific process.
R8. A set of tutorials should be created and maintained , for introducing application scientists to new key concepts in e-science.
Spawned e-science Data Mining SIG now - want to discuss solutions, not just problems

One-day workshop in April 2003
~10 people:
AstroGrid, UK wide field astronomy, IBM, Oracle
Identified spatial indexing in large databases as a problem of interest beyond astronomy
Spawned research programme on spatial indexing in sky survey databases - NeSC,
WFAU, IBM, Oracle and Microsoft future applications to other spatially-indexed domains

Three day meeting in June/July 2003
Focus for visits by Jim Gray (Microsoft), Alex
Szalay (Johns Hopkins), Roy Williams (again!)
25 participants - Virtual Observatory, database and data grid communities in UK, US, Europe
Report [UKeS-2003-03]
Spawning “SkyQuery-G” take SkyQuery.Net WWW service for matching astronomical sources, and make it a grid service, using
OGSA-DAI and/or ELDAS

RL positions valuable from applications side long, steep learning curve for average scientist
RL positions valuable from “infrastructure” side sustained involvement with user community allows creation of realistic testbeds
Visitor(s)
Workshop
Report model works
Serious Concern conceptual chasm between infrastructure builders and application scientists
RL-type positions help bridge it, but what else?