Friday, October 12, Volen 106, 12:10-1:10 pm. (Refreshments at 12:00pm)
I have been working to federate the astronomy archives of the world -- building the World-Wide Telescope. My talk at MIT on October 11 describes the challenge and describes some of the things we have been doing in collaboration with the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) and Cal Tech. You can find a variant of that talk at http://research.microsoft.com/~gray/talks, You can also see an interesting web site at http://skyserver.sdss.org/. This talk goes into much more detail, indeed gory detail, for database centric people. It gives a tour of the database design, walks through the 20 queries that the DB was designed to answer (the queries are described in the SIGMOD paper of last year (http://research.microsoft.com/~gray/papers/MS_TR_99_30_Sloan_Digital_Sk y_Survey.pdf) and covers a few new queries that have tested the design. But SDSS is just one archive. We are also working to federate multiple archives. The last part of the talk describes the basic web services that we hope each archive will offer. These are SOAP calls that return record sets that can be integrated by the client. We are starting by designing the services needed to do cross-correlation among astronomy datasets.
Bio:
Jim Gray is part of Microsoft's research group. His work focuses on databases and transaction processing. Jim is active in the research community, is an ACM, NAS, AAAS, and NAE Fellow, and received the Turing Award for his work on transaction processing. He is also a member of the PITAC, and an editor of a book series on data management.
Host:Mitch Cherniak