Modeling complex astrophysics data

摘要

Scientific data are often characterized by large volumes of data,complex data relationships, and complex algorithms that operate on thosedata. Databases at the Space Telescope Science Institute are used toillustrate some of the differences between traditional data managementschemes and the requirements of scientific data. Data from radioastronomy are modeled using conceptual enhancements to flexible imagetransport system (FITS) binary tables, which are compared to relationaldatabase tables. These enhancements are used to capture features of amore general notion of an observation. Finally, it is argued thataccessing and manipulating each data, in order to support the entireprocess of data analysis, requires the construction of an abstract datamodel that intuitively models how a domain specialist views the data