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I love astronomy since a very long time and I worked 3 years at Opendatasoft : I was able to link both by creating datastro.eu, an open data portal about astronomy built with the Opensatasoft platform.
You can read the article (in French) "Datastro.eu : histoire d'un projet un peu spatial" for more details about this project.
About the portal technology (Opendatasoft)
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This portal is built with Opensatasoft, a great SaaS platform that makes it easy to collect, visualize and share (open) data on multiple formats: tables, maps, charts, pictures…
The platform philosophy could be this one: the people who can better manage and give value to the data are the people who know the data, because they created it and/or because they are using it. So, if you know what your data are talking about, it’s pretty easy to put it into a platform! Which brings me to the next part:
About me (Lise Guerriero)
- I am not a technical person: I have never coded nor developed anything, I can just figure things out with computers. But Opendatasoft makes data publishing so easy that I built this entire portal almost on my own, as a side-project. I collected, created, gathered the datasets I was interested in and our nice R&D team helped me on tricky things (collecting data directly from URL, applying processors to transform and “clean” the data, building elaborated heat maps from crowdsourced data…).
- I’m also not a scientist / pro astronomer: It took time to make up my mind, but I ended up studying documentation, information management and communication. But:
- I love science and especially astronomy. I was in an “astronomy class” in high school and I had the chance to participate in a “research project” (astrometry) for a week in a professional observatory, the OHP -“Observatoire de Haute-Provence”- in the south-east of France (a wink to the 18 years-old-me: I published on this portal the MPC data we took hours to laboriously print and analyze...). We presented our work at the French Physics Olympiads and were awarded at an ESO (European Southern Observatory) internal contest. Next to this observatory there was a public center about astronomy (“Centre d’Astronomie de Saint Michel l’Observatoire”)
- I like making science accessible to the general public: I worked in this center for several summers and I had the opportunity to talk to a lot of adults and children about astronomy. We offered different activities (astronomy classes, scale-model of the solar system, planetarium sessions, telescope sessions, etc.) and observations (of the sun and the night sky, with laser pointer to show and describe constellations, etc.). Now I still use my telescope (200 mm / 7,8'' Dobson) to look at summer sky treasures. And as I like to share my interest in astronomy, well I built Datastro...!
About you?
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Datastro.eu is an ongoing project, so feel free to contact me if you want to propose astronomy-related data, make a suggestion, or who knows?, if you would like to build an open data portal!
Datastro & Open Science MOOC
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Datastro is a partner of the Open Science MOOC project. This Open Science MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) is designed for students and researchers to learn skills to help them excel in a modern research environment. > Follow the project on Twitter!