The UMD Astronomy Information and Knowledge Group

About Us

Our group focuses on understanding, developing and application of new computer technologies to research problems in the field of Astronomy.

Members of our group include: Edward Shaya, Brian Thomas, Peter Teuben.

Projects

A short list of public stuff we have hosted at this site includes:

• Investigation of ontologies for astronomical information research and the development of an ontology-based GUI tool, OWLViper, to aid scientists in doing archive research. This tool would work in tandem with a knowledge discovery framework to search, fuse, and transform, scientific data held in archives into the form which the scientist/user finds useful.


• An Astronomical Catalog Archive for the U.S. National Virtual Observatory (NVO) and International Virtual Observatory (IVOA).


• VOORML (Virtual Observatory Object Relational Mapping Layer)   This software combines a native XML database with standard relational databases to allow expressive XML query of metadata with rapid relational database response times on large data sets.


• Data modeling work which includes the development of scientific quantity and collection/catalog models for the IVOA and an older (now defunct) project: eXtensible Data Format (XDF).