2007年清华大学信息技术研究院系列学术报告3

Roy Williams grew up in England and received a BA in Mathematics from Trinity College, Cambridge, followed by a PhD in Physics from the California Institute of Technology. Scientific activities and innovations include: using the web to expose Earth-observation data (1996); bringing XML technology to the LIGO project (1998), web-based workflow systems (1999); service and registry architecture for the virtual observatory (2000); the VOTable format now in widespread use (2002); the VOEvent infrastructure for astronomical transients (2004). Research interests include: service-oriented application architecture with XML, schema and web services; federating transient astronomical events and followup observations in real time to build intelligence; building secure, asynchronous gateways to information resources; web applications and web-database technologies; relational and XML databases; user authentication. Williams is co-Director and system architect of US National Virtual Observatory; Technical Lead of the International Virtual Observatory Alliance (IVOA); Chair of the IVOA VOEvent Working Group; and principal investigator of a number of projects that interface astronomy with cyberinfrastructure.

A few years ago, a prominent US advisory board recommended spending on the "Virtual Observatory". At a subsequent workshop, in 2000, it was clear that nobody knew what that meant! It also became clear that other national VO projects were being conceived in the same way. Seven years later, there is a strong international VO based on a Service-Oriented Architecture, that builds standards, tools, and services. The VO infrastructure allows astronomers to publish, classify, discover, and use multi-sourced astronomical data. This is a model that can be used for creation of knowledge-sharing virtual organizations in other domains. We will discuss the nature of the Virtual Observatory in terms of history, architecture, usage, sociology, standards, and trust; and of course the science that can be done much more efficiently than the old ways.