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| ESO Experts Workshop |
ESO employees are kindly invited to participate in the above mentioned internal workshop. In order to prepare place for everyone, we would appreciate your early reply. Please register with Christine Telander, DMD, ext.448 or mail <ctelande@eso.org>.
The ESO Experts Workshop programme is available from a separate document.
ESO organizes these working sessions with the aim to gather experts advice on the definition of the VLT Science Archive Facility. Having the VLT in the foreground but keeping other large telescopes in mind, we seek through this meeting to shape and project the capabilities of science archives into the next century.
Quality control applied to science operations will make the VLT a machine with predictable performance. An engineering archive will make operations traceable. These two elements will make possible that the archive will store data with a high scientific quality and homogeneity. This feature will boost the archive to become an additional instrument on the system, and with growing value.
Developments in the area of information technology allow already today to establish correlations along the `science cycle' from observational data to knowledge on sources to publications. Future retrieval systems will even allow to perform large scale parametric searches, thus making possible the identification of phenomena with similar patterns.
Homogeneous data will allow the application of standard processing at massive scale with the aim of extracting and deriving systematic results such as photometric magnitudes (survey mode), source variability indices or identification of serependitious events.
The challenge of building a facility to support a research environment of this kind is comparable to only few projects in this area. The result of this workshop should be a road map into the next century with clear directions (requirements), speed signs (priorities) and vehicle specs (constraints).
Discussions will focus on major aspects of archive systems. Each one will be introduced by the chairperson of the session through a short presentation. Conclusions will drawn as they pour off the discussion.