... but how will we find anything useful?

The Virtual Observatory promises us a world full of on-line data. The Linking Open Data community promises us that - if done properly - this data will be inter-linked and so will open up new avenues of research. However, it is not obvious how we will find this data as many of the current search and retrieval interfaces to Astronomical resources have not been updated to take advantage of this new "linked" world.

It has been said that "a little semantics goes a long way", so I have been investigating just how little we really need to provide a usable interface. In doing so I have explored faceted browsing (of ADS and IVOA registry resources), tagging (in particular using the MOAT project to provide a link to the IVOA semantics vocabulary work), and data modeling using the Resource Description Framework. In this presentation I shall discuss these adventures, point out areas where the future looks bright, and shine a spot light on some of the more problematic issues.


Last modified: Mon Jan 19 17:15:15 GMT 2009