SI2-SSE: Visualizing Astronomy Repository Data using WorldWide Telescope Software Systems

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WorldWide Telescope (WWT) provides a powerful data-visualization interface for data exploration and presentation. Through the open source WWT visualization software systems, this project enables the broader use of institutional and community-based, researcher-oriented astronomy data repositories and computational tools. WWT will be integrated with Astrolabe, a University of Arizona (UA) data repository targeted at researchers with legacy data, mostly supporting scholarly articles, and being built to provide dataset access using the (NSF-funded) CyVerse cyberinfrastructure. By creating a full-featured WWT web-based front-end, modularized for ease of connection to diverse astronomy data archives and computational tools, this project incorporates previously un-curated data. The UA and American Astronomical Society (AAS) project team will engage the astronomy research community to participate in these developments to make WWT a community-defined interface for data archives with linkages provided between data, software tools, and journal publications. By expanding the functionality and enabling the integration of WWT into repositories through a web-based version, WWT will become a common tool in the astronomers' workflow including supporting citizen science activities carried out by volunteers. This enables strong connections between research, education, and outreach so that an astronomer could use WWT as part of their research activities, and then share the work with educational communities and the public to benefit society.The astronomy community faces many challenges related to the large scale of big data, specifically: (1) the visualization of specific datasets in the context of other observations; and (2) organizing and sharing underlying data to enable reuse, citation, and verification of results. Data archives often end up reinventing visualization systems, in turn duplicating previous efforts, and resulting in visualization interfaces built around the data rather than the needs of researchers. The astronomy researcher workflow incorporates depositing data to make it discoverable through search and browsing, accessible through open access, actionable through connections to existing tools as well as community-developed tools running on CyVerse, and finally visualizing or citing data. Through this project, WWT will provide a powerful interface for browsing, interacting with high performance and high throughput processing, and displaying data retrieved from searches of the archives. Effective searching will be enabled by integration with community-managed taxonomy, in the form of the Unified Astronomy Thesaurus (UAT) in both the Astrolabe functions and the WWT interface. In creating a full-featured, web-based client modular version of WWT as a front-end to archives, starting with Astrolabe, and integrating the UAT into search and browsing functions, this project will both serve the broad community of astronomy researchers as well as mitigating costs for archives to develop this visualization capacity.