Data integration and analysis in Heliophysics

Astronomy has always been a data driven science. In the 21st Century, the capability for automated data gathering and the sheer volume of data gathered from modern observatories and space missions, has led to a new discipline of astroinformatics. This discipline develops the tools to search, process, sort and analyse data, and is analogous to the discipline of bioinformatics.

This project applies methods of astroinformatics in Heliophysics, the study of the interaction between the magnetic field of the sun and the magnetic fields of the planets.The computer science areas of research involve the use of languages for semantic description (e.g ontologies) and the use of automated methods for data integration and analysis, expressed in scientific workflows. In Heliophysics the data integration and searching challenges are severe, the number of space missions and ground observatories observing the heliosphere runs into many hundreds with data gathering rates in the Terabit/second range. Also, the data sources have developed independently and the data needs to be integrated from energy flows which are four dimensional (space + time). The project is based on collaborations established in the international HELIO project (www.helio-vo.eu).