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 Communication in the field of astronomical software
   
fitz
 06/12/2008 10:14AM (Read 4646 times)  
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I received the following email and thought it might be of interest to this forum. While I believe there are practical limitations to what one might expect from the AstroSoftware community in terms of what collective knowledge might be accumulated to cover all wavebands and use-cases, I was intrigued by the idea that Web 2.0 or at least another avenue of discussion outside of the standard conferences might be another way to sharing experiences or express a want for such a forum.The original sender is anonymized but I'll forward any comments. If iraf.net should, in your collective opinion, provide such a forum I'd be happy to enable that as well. Personally, I've found SPIE to be a truly interesting meeting with lots of new ideas; over the last few years ADASS is not quite as informative IMHO, but still vital to connecting with people 'in the field'. Regardless, helping to populate a start-up site with the kind of content this needs is a bit beyond what I have time for right now, but I'd gladly read the forums. I would strongly encourage others who want to 'publish' their work on such a venue to speak up, and if it begins to take off I think there might be some collaborative documentation in my future.Comments?[quote:0604a153ef]
I have been wondering if there are ways to encourage better on-line sharing of people's experience in astronomical software. In particular, could the new collaborative technologies sometimes described as Web 2.0 be used for this? I'm sending these thoughts to a number of people I know in the field, to try to gauge if there is any merit in pursuing this.Obviously, there is already a wealth of information available on the web, but at the moment there is no single place where it is easy to tap into the collected knowledge of everyone working in this field. If you look in the software section of AstroWeb, for example, there is a rather outdated list of available packages including a rather encouraging description of ASDS as a site intended to facilitate the reuse of existing astronomical software. However, I contacted Bob Hanisch, and he confirmed that ASDS is no longer active.This seems a shame. There doesn't really even seem to be a single site where one can find out what is in use throughout the community. And there is certainly nothing designed to provide access to people's practical experiences with the plethora of available astronomical software. How do you decide which data reduction system you should use? How do you decide on the software structure for a new telescope? If you're building a new detector system, or a new data reduction pipeline, how should you control it? Trying to answer a set of questions like this just recently, I realised how limited my picture of what was going on had become.In practice, you ask someone in the next office, you Google for likely sounding terms, you e-mail people you know, you try to remember what you heard at the last ADASS or SPIE meeting you managed to get to. To the extent that there is a centralised system for disseminating information in our field, it is these meetings. They have been enormously successful, which indicates that there is a thirst for communication in this community, and their collected papers are a useful resource. As is always said of conferences, however, you often find out the most useful things in the discussions that happen outside the formal presentations. This, for example, is where you hear about the things that didn't work (most talks and posters are, naturally, about things that did work - when did you last hear a talk called "what we wish we hadn't done in this project" ?) and where you find out what people have in mind for the future. It is also where you get to meet the people you can e-mail later when you need advice. And these things don't get into the published papers.Not everybody gets to ADASS meetings, (or SPIE, which is only bi-annual, is rather more overwhelming, but which does cover telescope and instrument control software). Conferences are expensive (and are going to get more so, as air travel costs increase). At the same time, the facilities for collaboration provided by the collection of technologies sometimes called Web 2.0 are maturing and becoming cheaper to implement.This e-mail is not a suggestion that we should try to arrange astronomical software conferences in Second Life (although people do). But perhaps we should consider a site aimed at astronomical collaboration? Getting a completely up to date list, not just of available packages, but also perhaps of who uses what (say if one person from each institution at the next ADASS undertook to produce a list of what they use) would be a good start. If people could be encouraged to contribute more wide ranging reviews of what's available, that would be even better, and if it could facilitate discussion of problems, solutions, directions in which things are moving, then even better.It seems to me that every so often things like this are started, often with enthusiasm and the odd grant, and they provide a useful service for a while and then fade. That isn't an argument for not doing it of course, and the emergence of new technologies means that things do need to be re-implemented from time to time. What new sites like Wikis provide is the ability to be run with less centralised management - when anyone can contribute, the role of a central administration changes from that of organising the content to one of exercising some editorial control (should that prove necessary). And it seems that if such sites get enough momentum, their collaborative nature will keep them growing.Something like this should be possible, and it seems to me it should be worthwhile. It would need some effort to set up. There are plenty of people around who could set up such a site from a technical point of view - most University IT departments could provide a suitable student, I'm sure. The editorial and sociological aspects of setting it up are almost certainly harder - deciding on the initial structure, then soliciting enough material (from busy people) to get enough momentum going that the site itself encourages further contributions. It did occur to me that whoever did do the initial setting up would end up with a very good overview of the field, and that in itself might be quite an incentive - given that I started this line of thought with the realisation that my knowledge of the current state of play had become well out of date! Surely others must feel the same?I'd be interested in any comments you might have. Please feel free to pass this on to anyone you think might be interested. If there is any interest in following this up, one obvious forum would be an ADASS BOF session on the general lines of 'communication, particularly the use of today's Web'. Perhaps by November some sort of consensus might have emerged.[/quote:0604a153ef]

 
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