Wide-Field Astronomy Unit Equipment Grant 2014-15

This grant provides computer hardware necessary for continued operation of the WFCAM, VISTA and OmegaCAM Science Archives, which curate and publish optical near-infrared photometric data from the Wide-Field Camera on UKIRT and from public surveys being undertaken with the VISTA and VST telescopes.

The focus of WFAU's work is to support and enhance the research undertaken by professional astronomers, but its likely beneficiaries include a wider community of academics from other disciplines, companies in the commercial IT sector, educators and members of the general public: we address each of these classes of beneficiaries in turn.

Academics from other disciplines
Astronomy is ahead of many disciplines in developing, and adhering to, standards for recording metadata and for aiding interoperability between data resources. WFAU staff are in demand, therefore, as speakers at multi-disciplinary workshops to describe the Unit's work as an example of best practice in scientific data curation. WFAU has also provided detailed material for case studies developed by the Digital Curation Centre and several academic and commercial organisations producing reports on aspects of data curation (e.g. for JISC). This engagement with wider data curation community will continue under the aegis of this grant, with WFAU disseminating best practice through publications in the data curation literature and further workshops: these are typically made available on the WWW, and so can be of benefit to a wider community of researchers.

WFAU enjoys a long-standing collaborative relationship with computer science (CS) researchers in the University of Edinburgh's School of Informatics, as aspects of our work provide either demanding applications of new CS techniques or the stimulus for new methods. This interaction has led to the publications in the CS literature in the areas of machine learning, data management and multi-agent systems, and we intend to continue this collaboration through this grant.

The commercial IT sector
WFAU's sky survey curation activities produce challenging computational requirements. On the hardware side, we intend to continue our long-standing relationship with a local hardware supplier, Eclipse Computing of Lugar, Ayrshire, who have, in the past, lent us hardware to prototype high-performance databases systems and collaborated with us in their evaluation. In this way, they can continue to exploit our motivation for building systems meeting our requirements as a means to develop expertise that they can deploy in commercial settings that have similar workloads to our own.
On the software side, we intend to become involved in the SciDB (www.scidb.org) initiative, which is developing a new open source data management system which extends the relational model: this would secure UK involvement in the development of this exciting new technology and aid its adoption by UK companies in domains (e.g. oil exploration, pharmaceuticals) facing similar data management and analysis scalability challenges.

Educators and the general public
WFAU has an established record in outreach, inherited from its previous incarnation as the UK Schmidt Telescope Unit (UKSTU) of the ROE. WFAU staff provide popular computer-based displays at the annual ROE Open Days, and these will be enhanced during the period of this grant.