Sharing images intelligently: The Astronomy Vizualisation Metadata standard
Robert L. Hurt, Adrienne J Gauthier, Lars Lindberg Christensen, Ryan Wyatt · 2008
High quality astronomical images, accompanied by rich caption and background information, abound on the web and yet prove notoriously difficult to locate efficiently using existing search tools. For instance, “flat” searches will return dozens of hits for low-quality images and miss more important related images from large observatories. The Virtual Astronomy Multimedia Project offers a solution via the Astronomy Visualization Metadata (AVM) standard. VAMP manages the design, implementation, and dissemination of the AVM standard for the education & public outreach (EPO)/press astronomical images that observatories publish. Problems with web images: search and context The astronomical EPO community plays a key role in conveying the results of scientific research to the general public. A key product of EPO development is a variety of non-scientific public image resources, both derived from scientific observations and created as artistic visualisations of scientific results. Images are generally made available in formats such as JPEG, TIFF, PNG, and GIF (i.e., not scientific FITS datasets). Such resources are currently scattered across the internet in a variety of galleries and archives, but are not searchable in any coherent or unified way (nor via machine-generated queries). This issue is described in detail in Gauthier et al. (2007).