Astro-technology Seminar
Speaker: André Moitinho (CENTRA - University of Lisbon)
Location: FCUL, building C8, room 8.2.11
Abstact:
By 2022, the ESA Gaia mission will have produced a Petabyte archive. So will the upcoming EUCLID mission. The LSST Telescope, starting around 2020 will produce several Petabytes. In fact, most of the data leading to new astronomical discoveries are now expected to come from huge online archives.
Within the panoply of methods used for data exploration, visualisation is often the starting point and even the guiding reference for scientific thought. But massive data volumes pose challenges for visual data exploitation:
- The physical size of the archives implies that the data reside in remote servers.
- Also, exploration is interactive. The tools must be responsive even with big remote databases.
- Then there are the analytic and cognitive aspects: Too many data to represent and too many high-dimensional interrelations. It is too easy to become Data Stunned!
In this seminar, I will describe a visual exploration service we have developed for the Gaia archive. The service has two main goals. The first one is to provide a platform for interactive visual exploration of the archive contents available to most users. The second aim is to produce intelligible and appealing visual representations of the enormous information content of the archive.