The Future of Astrophysical Data Infrastructure — Workshop Announcement

The Center for Computational Astrophysics (CCA) at the Flatiron Institute, in collaboration with the National Science Foundation, is pleased to announce the Future of Astrophysical Data Infrastructure Workshop, to be held 13 to 16 February 2023, at the Flatiron Institute in New York City. The goal of this four-day workshop is to identify and prioritize strategies and options for implementing recommendations from the Decadal Survey on Astronomy and Astrophysics 2020 relating to ground-based astrophysical data management. The CCA invites US and international members of the astronomy community to attend the workshop and contribute to its final product, a publicly available report with findings for the community and for the funding agencies.

Register here: https://forms.gle/bhXFSFStvLha2tf96 

Meeting website: https://indico.flatironinstitute.org/event/3466/ 

Rationale: The Astro2020 decadal survey provided an analysis and overview of the landscape for data management for ground-based observatories, noting that “Progress [in creating effective data archives] will come from an end-to-end approach that considers the entire flow of data from the instrument, to the archive, to analysis and publication.” And that “The NSF and stakeholders should develop a plan to address how to design, build, deploy, and sustain pipelines for producing science-ready data across all general-purpose ground-based observatories.” Developing a successful implementation plan to address the recommendations around data management will require collaboration and buy-in from the community and the primary stakeholders, and coordination among the relevant funding agencies.

This workshop is focused on identifying technical solutions, implementation options, a long term vision, and a tentative roadmap to address the recommendations highlighted above. We encourage participants to think big and be ambitious. While contributions related to individual science cases and highlights of the capabilities of existing data centers might be useful in informing the discussion, they are not the main focus of this meeting.

While registration is open to everybody, the SOC will ultimately select participants based on their professional background and capacity to contribute to the goals of the workshop. Participation is necessarily limited by the capacity of the venue and the format of the workshop. We apologize in advance if you are not selected to participate.

On behalf of the organizing committee:

• Adrian Price-Whelan
• Luca Rizzi
• Kelle Cruz
• Julianne Dalcanton
• John O’Meara
• Dara Norman
• Wil O'Mullane
• Roopesh Ojha
• Beth Willman