New challenges of astroinformatics - STARK-B database and Serbian virtual observatory - SerVO, and relations to European virtual atomic data cenjter - VAMDC

Abstract

The development of space born astronomy, providing a huge amount of high quality astronomical data created an information avalanche and leaded to the formation of huge data collections. In order to address the problem how to analyse such amount of data, the idea of Virtual Observatory was formulated at the end of 2000, and from 2001 the FP5 project Astrophysical Virtual Observatory - AVO was the basis for creation of European Virtual Observatory - EURO-VO (http://www.euro-vo.org). SerVO - Serbian virtual observatory (http://www.servo.aob.rs/∼darko) is a project created in 2008, with the objectives: a) Establishing SerVO and join the EuroVO and IVOA; b) Establishing SerVO data Center for digitizing, archiving and publishing in VO format photo-plates and other astronomical data produced at Belgrade Astronomical Observatory; c) Development of tools for visualization of data; d) Publishing, together with Observatoire de Paris, STARK-B - Stark broadening data base containing as the first step Stark broadening parameters obtained within the semiclassical perturbation approach by two of us (MSD-SSB) in VO compatible format; e) Make a mirror site for DSED (Darthmouth Stellar Evolution Database in the context of VO. In order to enable an efficacious and convenient search for available atomic and molecular data, to build a secure, flexible and interoperable e-science environment based interface to the existing Atomic and Molecular databases and solve the existing problems in A&M data community, preventing productive search and data mining, the FP7 founded project Virtual Atomic and Molecular Data Center (VAMDC) started on July 1 2009. The core of the VAMDC e-infrastructure is the databases upon which it is based, and our contribution to the VAMDC e-infrastructure are the STARK-B database (http://stark-b.obspm.fr), a collaborative project between Laboratoire d'Etude du Rayonnement et de la matière en Astrophysique of the Observatoire de Paris-Meudon and the Astronomical Observatory of Belgrade. This is a database of the theoretical widths and shifts of isolated lines of atoms and ions due to collisions with charged perturbers, obtained within the impact approximation. We review here SerVO, STARK-B and VAMDC projects within the context of e-science in Astronomy - Astroinformatics. © 2011 ACM.