VOSD: a general-purpose virtual observatory over semantic databases

Abstract

E-Science relies heavily on manipulating massive amounts of data for research purposes. Researchers should be able to contribute their own data and methods, thus making their results accessible and reproducible by others worldwide. They need an environment which they can use anytime and anywhere to perform data-intensive computations. Virtual observatories serve this purpose. With the advance of the Semantic Web, more and more data is available in Resource Description Framework based databases. It is often desirable to have the ability to link data from local sources to these public data sets. We present a prototype system, which satisfies the requirements of a virtual observatory over semantic databases, such as user roles, data import, query execution, visualization, exporting result, etc. The system has special features which facilitate working with semantic data: visual query editor, use of ontologies, knowledge inference, querying remote endpoints, linking remote data with local data, extracting data from web pages.