Designing a faceted search for solar data (abstract)

by Ian Ruotsala

In library, information and computer science, an ontology is a network of relationships. A well-known subset of an ontology is a “taxonomy,” which is an ontology consisting of “is a” relationships. Biological taxonomies such as “a human is a primate is a mammal is an animal” provide a concrete example. While taxonomies have often been used by software developers as a basis for categorizing a set of items, more general ontologies can provide a richer description of relationships within a set.

Faceted searches provide a way to navigate through instances of a more general ontology, and have been increasingly used by Internet merchants such as Amazon to provide intuitive ways of searching and browsing through their products. For this project, an implementation of faceted search was attempted for solar physics data. Using an Internet browser as a platform, a JavaScript program was to be developed in which a data base of solar events (e.g. flares, sunspots) and observations (which instrument was used, which astronomer cataloged the event) would be queried so that data could be accessed in a dynamic, intuitive way.