SEI: Coordinated Visualization and Analysis of Sky Survey Data and Astronomical Literature

由于大量新的科学数据和快速增长的动态和高度专业化的科学知识体系，天文学等学科的科学家面临着越来越多的挑战，以跟上研究前沿并保持对科学数据的良好理解。信息技术有可能增强科学家应对这些挑战的复杂性、动态性和规模的能力。这一跨学科项目旨在推动信息综合技术及其在天文学中的应用，并支持在天文文献的整体背景下分析天文数据。这项研究的重点是对与斯隆数字天空调查(SDSS)相关的四个数据源确定的模式进行分析和建模：SDSS天文数据、来自SDSS SkyServer的搜索查询日志数据、从NASA天体物理数据系统(ADS)提取的SDSS特定书目数据集以及从科学引文索引(SCI)提取的跨学科书目数据集。这项研究推进了跟踪主题趋势和检测概念变化的技术的整合和创新使用，整合文本挖掘和引文网络分析，可视化空间-语义结构和时间模式，并纳入用于假设生成和检验的视觉分析工具。该项目是：(1)建立一个天文数据和文献协调获取、可视化和分析的概念和业务平台；(2)开发可扩展的算法和工具，用于跟踪知识的演变和传播，促进假说的产生和检验；(3)开发可扩展的算法和工具，用于逐步可视化大规模天文数据和学术出版物；(4)评估知识可视化和跟踪在天文学和更广泛的学科中的使用情况。该项目将生产一个交互式的3D天空浏览器、协调的天文-书目可视化、科学发现的可视探索者，以及用于产生假设的工具。这项研究在使科学家能够跟踪其所在领域的进展以及促进研究和评估大量新数据在科学发现和学术交流中的作用方面具有更广泛的影响。这些可视化工具和指标将衡量利用SDSS作出的新天文发现的传播和接受率，确定影响最大的发现，阐明不同研究小组之间的互动和反馈模式，并衡量NSF支持的SDSS的科学有效性，并帮助规划未来的天文调查项目。这项研究对科学技术的教育和推广具有直接影响，有助于增进公众对科学的理解，并指导新的研究人员通过一个具有明确知识路线图的研究领域。对于天文学界来说，这些工具的影响将包括通过确定最重要的论文并通过SkyExplorer界面将这些论文与原始的SDSS数据连接起来，从而帮助该领域的新研究人员，特别是学生。与SDSS相关的引文网络将为可能分析来自其他调查和其他波长的类似数据集提供路线图。这些工具也将对编写及时的教育材料很有价值。

Scientists in disciplines such as astronomy are facing increasing challenges in order to keep abreast of research fronts and maintain a good understanding of scientific data due to massive volumes of new scientific data and rapidly growing bodies of dynamic and highly specialized scientific knowledge. Information technology has the potential to augment scientists' abilities to deal with the complexity, dynamics, and scale of these challenges. This interdisciplinary project aims to advance information integration techniques and their applications to astronomy and support the analysis of astronomical data in an integral context of astronomical literature. The research focuses on the analysis and modeling of patterns to be identified from four data sources in association with the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS): the SDSS astronomical data, the search query log data from the SDSS SkyServer, an SDSS-specific bibliographic dataset drawn from the NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS), and an interdisciplinary bibliographic dataset drawn from the Science Citation Index (SCI). The research advances the integration and innovative use of techniques for tracking thematic trends and detecting conceptual changes, integrated text mining and citation network analysis, and visualizing spatial-semantic structural and temporal patterns, and incorporating visual analytics tools for hypothesis generation and testing. The project are (1) to establish a conceptual and operational platform for coordinated access, visualization, and analysis of astronomical data and literature; (2) to develop scalable algorithms and tools for tracking the evolution and diffusion of knowledge and for facilitating hypothesis generation and testing; (3) to develop scalable algorithms and tools for incrementally visualizing large-scale astronomical data and scholarly publications; and (4) to evaluate the use of knowledge visualization and tracking in astronomy and a broader range of disciplines. The project will produce an interactive 3D sky browser, coordinated astronomical-bibliographic visualizations, visual explorers of scientific discoveries, and tools for hypothesis generation. The research has broader impacts in terms of enabling scientists to keep track of the advances of their own fields and facilitating the study and evaluation of the role of massive new data in scientific discovery and scholarly communication. These visualization tools and metrics will measure the rate of dissemination and acceptance of new astronomical discoveries made with SDSS, identify the highest impact discoveries, illuminate patterns of interaction and feedback among different research groups, and measure the scientific effectiveness of the NSF-supported SDSS and aid planning for future astronomical survey projects. The research has direct implications on education and outreach of science and technology in terms of improving public understanding of science and guiding new researchers through a field of study with a clear intellectual roadmap. For the astronomical community, the impact of these tools will include aiding new researchers in the field, particularly students, by identifying the most important papers and connecting these to the original SDSS data through the SkyExplorer interface. The network of SDSS-related citations will provide a roadmap to possible analysis of similar datasets from other surveys and at other wavelengths. The tools will be also valuable to the development of timely educational materials.