AstroDAS: Sharing Assertions Across Astronomy Catalogues Through Distributed Annotation

As diverse scientific data collections migrate online, researchers want the ability to share their assertions regarding the entities that span these disparate databases. We focus on a case study provided by the astronomical community’s Virtual Observatory effort to investigate the use of annotation to record and share the celestial object mappings asserted by different research groups. The prototype for our Astronomy Distributed Annotation System (AstroDAS) complements the existing OpenSkyQuery tools for federated database queries, and provides web service methods to allow clients to create and store mapping annotations as relational database tuples on annotation servers. We expect the mechanisms for creating and querying annotations in AstroDAS can be extended to assist with tasks other than entity mapping, in other domains with relational data sources.