Radio Astronomy Data sharing on the Internet
Andrea Corvillon, PHT,
https://asa.alma.cl/UserRegistration/newAccount.jsp
I was looking at your data sharing page at https://almascience.nrao.edu/aq/?result_view=observations
On the registration page, it failed because “The Internet Foundation” was not in your list. That would also seem to restrict anyone from most of the Internet not in your list from registering. There are roughly 5 billion humans with some access to the Internet now. I am 74. There are about 700 Million people now older than 65. Many of them have worked all their lives and are not currently “working” at one of the organizations in your list. Your list is not visible. Your list does not have categories.
The Internet Foundation sets policies for sharing on the Internet. 23 Jul 2023 is the 25th Anniversary of the Internet Foundation. I studied astrophysics at UMD College Park in the last 1970’s . But ended up studying detection of dynamic gravitational fields. (Joe Weber, Robert Forward, Charles Misner are names you might recognize)
I tried to find samples of data. I can read CASA Measurement Sets but missing some information.
These projects and MOUS do not seem to have basic data on when, how long, what frequencies, how many records, how much data of what type.
I finally got to where I could get lists of mous like uid://A001/X62/X2a and can download that. But it seemed better to register. Except I could not. There is no easy way I could see to get an overview of the groups in your “list”.
Is there something that tells me how many observations went into uid://A001/X62/X2a? Time and frequency slots? File sizes are not very useful to know the contents. When I click for detail from uid://A001/X62/X2a the url hides the selection so I cannot bookmark. Going back wipes out the selection.
Trying again, I searched for one MOU and then got to https://almascience.nrao.edu/aq/?result_view=observations&mous=uid:%2F%2FA001%2FX62%2FX2a. Not sure why it only gave https://almascience.nrao.edu/aq/?result_view=observations the first time.
Is there any way to get more detail on the data in files like 2011.0.00191.S_2011-12-06_006_of_023.tar without downloading them? This was the first in the list and it is “11 GB” with zero metadata that I can see.
Most users of the Internet (there are probably millions who could understand what the data is all about and use online tools for education and research) if they could see what is in large files without having to download them and somehow find the software and somehow find the formats. Billions of humans are interested in space now, and tens of millions have the backgrounds in science and math to work with algorithms, data and observations, particularly AI assisted (“machine learning”).
Richard Collins, The Internet Foundation
