The Gaia Archive: VO in Action in the Big Data Era

摘要

ESA's Gaia mission will survey the sky for at least 5 years measuring high accuracy astrometry, radial velocities and multi-colour photometry. The Data Analysis and Processing Consortium (DPAC) efforts will result in an astronomical catalogue with unprecedented accuracy and completeness of up to 1 billion (1E9) sources, and over 1PB of associated data products. This brings big data challenges in storing, querying and distributing all the associated data and metadata, comparing them with other astronomical catalogues, enabling analysis, visualization, data mining and then sharing these results with other scientists. The amount of data involved forces a change of paradigm in dealing with astronomy archives. The usual usage of downloading the data to the users for her/him to work further on it needs towards evolve to a new way of working where the users' can send her/his code to the data, run it there on computing and storage services provided directly by the archive, where the data reside. To answer to all these new technical challenges, the Gaia Archive has directly adopted VO standards (TAP, ADQL, UWS, VOSpace, SAMP amongst others) to build the archive data management infrastructure, giving birth to one of the first "VO-built in" astronomy archive. Embracing VO technology from the start also ensures full interoperability of the Gaia archive to other VO compliant data archives and applications.