VOGCLUSTERS: an example of DAME web application

Along with the progress of the instruments for astronomical investigation of our Galaxy, the amount of data available for each globular clusters (GC) in the Milky Way is also growing at a steady rate. In this very moment, several instruments from earth and from space are restlessly working to improve our detailed knowledge of such objects, which are of utterly importance for our understanding of the status and evolution of our Galaxy. Moreover, since some of the older objects in the Universe are contained in globular clusters, they have a key role also in many cosmological topics.

The importance of globular clusters for a broad range of astronomical studies has been already addressed by Harris (1996). In that seminal paper (that introduced the famous online parameter compilations for galactic globular clusters) he also stressed the importance of having readily available up-to-date list of parameters for these unique objects. After all these years, his words appear even truer: not only we have new and more reliable parameters for a great part of the known clusters, but -thanks also to modern surveys conducted in bands different from the visible, such as 2MASS (Skrutskie et al. 2006) -several other objects keep going to increase our list of Milky Way clusters (e.g., Froebrich et al. 2008, Moni Bidin et al. 2011).

However, at the present day, such data appears still scattered among the various papers and/or are reported in different (and for the most part not-homogeneous) web pages and online catalogues. Such resources typically cannot be easily put in connection by people who want to make researches involving all kind of data.

Nowadays it appears more and more important to delineate a strategy in order to present the relevant information on a given cluster, or a range of clusters, in a single source and under a well-defined standard. This represents a necessary step to disclose a wide range of new investigations: the more we find ways to explore the parameters space, the more we’ll be able to make useful science investigating upon the correlations of those set of data.

Castellani, Brescia, Macini, Pellecchia, Longo the following it is presented a brief introduction to a project born to meet these requirements, named VOGCLUSTERS1 .

The Galactic Globular Clusters Database (gclusters) is an online resource2 , focused on presenting, in an organized way, a comprehensive list of bibliography, parameters and data for each of the known GCs of the Milky Way (Castellani 2007).

From the technical point of view, gcluster it is a “classical” dynamical web site, and can be considered as a prototype of VOGCLUSTERS. Initially built around the Harris compilation, it is designed to allow a more flexible fruition of available data, allowing a number of operations on data, such as ordering clusters according to the value of a given parameter, select objects whose parameters falling in a given interval, display related bibliography and colour magnitude diagrams, or even drop a note pertinent to that cluster, to be displayed online for other user.

Data are collected from several different sources, such as NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS), Digital Sky Survey, related papers and websites, etc.

The goal of the project VOGCLUSTERS is the development of a web application specialized in data and text mining activities for astronomical archives related to galactic and extragalactic GCs. Main services are employed for the simple and quick navigation in the archives and their manipulation to correlate and integrate internal scientific information. The archives are uniformed under Virtual Observatory standard and constraints, in order to provide an homogenous and flexible environment, virtually capable of interactions with an ever growing amount of external resources. At variance with gcluster, the project has not to be intended as a straightforward website, but as a web application.

A website usually refers to the front-end interface through which the public interact with your information online. Websites are typically informational in nature with a limited amount of advanced functionality. Simple websites consist primarily of static content where the data displayed is the same for every visitor and content changes are infrequent; more advanced websites may also have management and interactive content. A web application, or equivalently Rich Internet Application (RIA) usually includes a website component but features additional advanced functionality to replace or enhance existing processes. The interface design objective behind a web application is to simulate the intuitive, immediate interaction a user experiences with a desktop application.

) is an international collaboration for data mining and machine learning research program, by exploiting the web2.0 technologies and exposing a series of applications and services for e-science communities. In particular, since the beginning, it is specialized in astrophysical services.

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