The Knowledge Infrastructure of Astronomy

Big data, data-intensive science, and eScience are contemporary terms to describe research fields that generate, manipulate, and manage large volumes of data. Astronomy was among the first data-intensive fields, hence many other domains wish to learn from the experience of astronomers. Their knowledge infrastructure – an ecology of people, practices, technologies, institutions, material objects, and relationships – has accumulated over millennia. Over the last several decades, the practice of astronomy has transitioned from analog to digital technologies. In turn, the broad adoption of common tools, standards, and technologies has enabled astronomers to construct infrastructure components such as the Astrophysics Data System (ADS), the Strasbourg Astronomical Data Center (CDS), the NASA Extragalactic Database (NED), the Virtual Observatory, and data archives for missions such as Chandra, Hubble, and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. While far from complete or seamless, the knowledge infrastructure for astronomy provides more comprehensive access to scientific publications and data than do most other scientific domains. This talk is drawn from continuing research on scholarship in astronomy (Borgman, Sands, Golshan, Darch, & Traweek, in progress) and a forthcoming book (Borgman, 2015). View online at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_kRVQ4m2z