Related link: http://arxiv.org/abs/cs/0208014
Web services can fill a bigger social need than presenting customers
with the prices of the newest gadget. In this article, “Web Services
for the Virtual Observatory,” they potentially open up new
possibilities for collaboration and data sharing among scientists.
Leaving aside the details of this intensive and heavy-weight project,
I took two interesting points from the article:
-
In the scientific world, there’s so much data that it has
to be distributed; nobody can collect all the data
relevant to their own work. -
Most of that data is stored in a format appropriate to some
specialized tool. Why not offer the APIs of that tool to
remote systems?
