Scientists in disciplines such as astronomy are facing increasing challenges in order to keep abreast of research fronts and maintain a good understanding of scientific data due to massive volumes of new scientific data and rapidly growing bodies of dynamic and highly specialized scientific knowledge. Information technology has the potential to augment scientists' abilities to deal with the complexity, dynamics, and scale of these challenges. This interdisciplinary project aims to advance information integration techniques and their applications to astronomy and support the analysis of astronomical data in an integral context of astronomical literature. The research focuses on the analysis and modeling of patterns to be identified from four data sources in association with the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS): the SDSS astronomical data, the search query log data from the SDSS SkyServer, an SDSS-specific bibliographic dataset drawn from the NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS), and an interdisciplinary bibliographic dataset drawn from the Science Citation Index (SCI). The research advances the integration and innovative use of techniques for tracking thematic trends and detecting conceptual changes, integrated text mining and citation network analysis, and visualizing spatial-semantic structural and temporal patterns, and incorporating visual analytics tools for hypothesis generation and testing. The project are (1) to establish a conceptual and operational platform for coordinated access, visualization, and analysis of astronomical data and literature; (2) to develop scalable algorithms and tools for tracking the evolution and diffusion of knowledge and for facilitating hypothesis generation and testing; (3) to develop scalable algorithms and tools for incrementally visualizing large-scale astronomical data and scholarly publications; and (4) to evaluate the use of knowledge visualization and tracking in astronomy and a broader range of disciplines. The project will produce an interactive 3D sky browser, coordinated astronomical-bibliographic visualizations, visual explorers of scientific discoveries, and tools for hypothesis generation. The research has broader impacts in terms of enabling scientists to keep track of the advances of their own fields and facilitating the study and evaluation of the role of massive new data in scientific discovery and scholarly communication. These visualization tools and metrics will measure the rate of dissemination and acceptance of new astronomical discoveries made with SDSS, identify the highest impact discoveries, illuminate patterns of interaction and feedback among different research groups, and measure the scientific effectiveness of the NSF-supported SDSS and aid planning for future astronomical survey projects. The research has direct implications on education and outreach of science and technology in terms of improving public understanding of science and guiding new researchers through a field of study with a clear intellectual roadmap. For the astronomical community, the impact of these tools will include aiding new researchers in the field, particularly students, by identifying the most important papers and connecting these to the original SDSS data through the SkyExplorer interface. The network of SDSS-related citations will provide a roadmap to possible analysis of similar datasets from other surveys and at other wavelengths. The tools will be also valuable to the development of timely educational materials.
