Yesterday George Hobbs from ATNF kindly hosted a teleconference for discussion of various approaches and tools available for astronomical databases. This was motivated by a number of queries he'd had about the ATNF Pulsar database and the related software. There are a variety of possible database management systems available (including the IDL solution I'd been using to date), so it is good to know a little bit more about their pros and cons. Also, there is much work being done, some in the context of the various virtual observatory efforts, in standardising astronomical data and methods of public access.
Below are some useful links and references that came up in the discussion.

• Tim Cornwall pointed to http://www.astrogrid.org which should be (as others also suggested) the first point of contact for making your data available/compatible to/with VO
• There is much software already available to view Virtual Observatory compatible data; see the VO-Software section at Euro-VO site, and the International Virtual Observatory Alliance (IVOA) for the data standards etc.
• Emil Lenc is using MySQL to store data related to the Australia Telescope Large Area Survey (ATLAS). Some suggested that his experience might be the most relevant in terms of people with small datasets wishing to manage them and/or make them public
• Russel Jurek (?) stood in for Baerbel Koribalski to talk about the HIPASS public data release; they have a nice webpage
• The other useful reference is last year's Astroinformatics School, which featured presentations on several topics relevant to this discussion </ul>

Labels: 2010, meetings