Innovation Anthology #167: Post Doctoral Fellow, Dept of History and Classics
Space may be the final frontier, but keeping track of data collected by scientists is still very earth bound.
That’s where a new Alberta based IT program hopes to ease the collaboration among space researchers around the globe.
Dr. Robert Rankin, a professor of physics at the University of Alberta heads the Canadian Space Science Data Portal.
Now with the support of CANARIE, Cybera and other agencies, Dr. Rankin’s team will spend the next two years expanding the software they’ve developed. The objective is to provide seamless integration of very different data sets.
DR ROBERT RANKIN: It’s a new technology where you have to use standards to access all these different data sources. They’re all in different formats. They’re stored on different types of computers. So it’s a technical challenge actually to get at all this data and bring it all together.
As Dr. Rankin explains, this new system will help with a NASA project to predict space storms.
DR. ROBERT RANKIN: These are magnetic storms where you have magnetic fields and their affect on charged particles that as a result of these storms can get very high energies and can cause damage in satellites.
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I’M CHERYL CROUCHER
Guest
Sara Komarnisky, PhD,
University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, SaraK@ualberta.ca
Sponsor
Program Date: 2008-09-16