Astronomical Data: Virtual and Real, Shared and Open

The astronomy community has well-established data archive centers and a culture of data sharing that was pioneered by NASA space missions and the first all-digital survey database, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey.  National and international data resources are now linked together by the Virtual Observatory (VO), which provides global data discovery and access and a platform for multi-wavelength research.  The current VO efforts focus on an "ecosystem" of interoperable science applications, tools, and services, and an "easy-as-Dropbox" style data-sharing and publications infrastructure.

Data Management in the Scientific Research Core

A Flow Cytometer is an analytical tool used by biomedical researchers for studies of many species and biological systems.  The data files generated by these systems can become quite large depending on the complexity of a particular system ranging upward of hundreds of kilobytes per file.  These instruments are typically housed in a research core to take advantage of shared resources of an institution.  The number of investigators taking advantage of these shard resources can be extensive at a particular research facility.

The storage, management, and achieving of the data generated by these shared resource instruments typically falls on the scientific core manager.  Scientific core managers can be quite busy handling the operation of their facility as well as conducting their own research.  Archiving of the data produced by these instruments can very be haphazard.  The randomness of achieving and storage can make retrieving data for analysis difficult and result in loss of precious data.  As scientific journals move toward open access of data files as part of a scientific publication, the archiving of this data becomes paramount while also maintaining protection of intellectual property of an individual scientist.  There currently is not a wide spread or proven system for the achieving and protection of this type of data.