Astrolabe Poster - 2018 NSF SI2 PI Meeting

Astrolabe is an ecosystem of tools to enable researchers to not only register data for long-term curation, but also manipulate and visualize data to facilitate verification and reuse. Where appropriate repositories are not available to support all relevant astronomical data products, data can fall into darkness: unseen and unavailable for future reference and reuse. Some data in this category are legacy or old data, but newer data sets are also often uncurated and could remain dark. According to participants in a series of project workshops, much astronomical dark data currently exist, and manipulation of these heterogeneous data requires a broad range of software that sometimes can only be executed by a few individuals and therefore becomes unusable because of changes in computing platforms. Astrolabe is a cloud-based cyberinfrastructure project that addresses this set of community recommendations for locating and ensuring the long-term curation of dark or otherwise at-risk data with integrated computing and visualization. Some visualization is provided through the WorldWide Telescope. Astronomical research questions and challenges would be better addressed with integrated data and computational resources that fall outside the scope of existing observatory and space mission projects. The project is based in CyVerse cyberinfrastructure technology and is a collaboration between the University of Arizona and the American Astronomical Society.