Multidimensional indexing tools for the virtual observatory

The last decade has seen a dramatic change in the way astronomy is carried out. The dawn of the the new microelectronic devices, like CCDs has dramatically extended the amount of observed data. Large, in some cases all sky surveys emerged in almost all the wavelength ranges of the observable spectru...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:	Astronomische Nachrichten Vol. 328; no. 8; pp. 852 - 857
Main Authors:	Csabai, I., Dobos, L., Trencséni, M., Herczegh, G., Józsa, P., Purger, N., Budavári, T., Szalay, A.S.
Format:	Journal Article
Language:	English
Published:	Berlin WILEY-VCH Verlag 01-10-2007 WILEY‐VCH Verlag
Subjects:	astronomical databases: miscellaneous methods: data analysis
Online Access:	Get full text
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Summary:	The last decade has seen a dramatic change in the way astronomy is carried out. The dawn of the the new microelectronic devices, like CCDs has dramatically extended the amount of observed data. Large, in some cases all sky surveys emerged in almost all the wavelength ranges of the observable spectrum of electromagnetic waves. This large amount of data has to be organized, published electronically and a new style of data retrieval is essential to exploit all the hidden information in the multiwavelength data. Many statistical algorithms required for these tasks run reasonably fast when using small sets of in‐memory data, but take noticeable performance hits when operating on large databases that do not fit into memory. We utilize new software technologies to develop and evaluate fast multidimensional indexing schemes that inherently follow the underlying, highly non‐uniform distribution of the data: they are layered uniform indices, hierarchical binary space partitioning, and sampled flat Voronoi tessellation of the data. These techniques can dramatically speed up operations such as finding similar objects by example, classifying objects or comparing extensive simulation sets with observations. (© 2007 WILEY‐VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)
Bibliography:	ArticleID:ASNA200710817 ark:/67375/WNG-6B56G2WR-N OTKA - No. T047244; No. MSRC-2005-038; No. NAP-2005/KCKHA005; No. MRTNCT-2004-503929 istex:07BEEFD316CE4B5F6D16660A15B47332D7633D03
ISSN:	0004-6337 1521-3994
DOI:	10.1002/asna.200710817