Astroinformatics: Data-oriented astronomy research and education

Abstract

The growth of data volumes in science is reaching epidemic proportions. Consequently, the status of data-oriented science as a research methodology needs to be elevated to that of the more established scientific approaches of experimentation, theoretical modeling, and simulation. Data-oriented scientific discovery is sometimes referred to as the new science of X-Informatics, where X refers to any science (e. g., Bio-, Geo-, Astro-) and informatics refers to the discipline of organizing, describing, accessing, integrating, mining, and analyzing diverse data resources for scientific discovery. Many scientific disciplines are developing formal sub-disciplines that are information-rich and data-based, to such an extent that these are now stand-alone research and academic programs recognized on their own merits. These disciplines include bioinformatics and geoinformatics, and will soon include astroinformatics. We introduce Astroinformatics, the new data-oriented approach to 21st century astronomy research and education. In astronomy, petascale sky surveys will soon challenge our traditional research approaches and will radically transform how we train the next generation of astronomers, whose experiences with data are now increasingly more virtual (through online databases) than physical (through trips to mountaintop observatories). We describe Astroinformatics as a rigorous approach to these challenges. We also describe initiatives in science education (not only in astronomy) through which students are trained to access large distributed data repositories, to conduct meaningful scientific inquiries into the data, to mine and analyze the data, and to make data-driven scientific discoveries. These are essential skills for all 21st century scientists, particularly in astronomy as major new multi-wavelength sky surveys (that produce petascale databases and image archives) and grand-scale simulations (that generate enormous outputs for model universes, such as the Millennium Simulation) become core research components for a significant fraction of astronomical researchers. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.