Astroinformatics

Astroinformatics is an interdisciplinary field of study involving the combination of astronomy, data science, machine learning, informatics, and information/communications technologies.

[2] Astroinformatics as a distinct field of research was inspired by work in the fields of Geoinformatics, Cheminformatics, Bioinformatics, and through the eScience work[10] of Jim Gray (computer scientist) at Microsoft Research, whose legacy was remembered and continued through the Jim Gray eScience Awards.

[11] Although the primary focus of astroinformatics is on the large worldwide distributed collection of digital astronomical databases, image archives, and research tools, the field recognizes the importance of legacy data sets as well—using modern technologies to preserve and analyze historical astronomical observations.

Some Astroinformatics practitioners help to digitize historical and recent astronomical observations and images in a large database for efficient retrieval through web-based interfaces.

Informatics has been recently defined as "the use of digital data, information, and related services for research and knowledge generation".

However the usual, or commonly used definition is "informatics is the discipline of organizing, accessing, integrating, and mining data from multiple sources for discovery and decision support."

Classification schemes (e.g., taxonomies, ontologies, folksonomies, and/or collaborative tagging[18]) plus Astrostatistics will also be heavily involved.

Citizen science projects (such as Galaxy Zoo) also contribute highly valued novelty discovery, feature meta-tagging, and object characterization within large astronomy data sets.

In this project, 900,000 images were considered for classification that were taken from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS)[22] for the past 7 years.

[24] In 2012, two position papers[25][26] were presented to the Council of the American Astronomical Society that led to the establishment of formal working groups in astroinformatics and Astrostatistics for the profession of astronomy within the US and elsewhere.