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In today's world of rapid fire astronomical discovery, it is often hard to keep track of the myriad of new press releases, images, animations and illustrations that make their way onto the internet on a daily — and often hourly — basis. While astronomy content is among some of the most popular online, even in mainstream forums like iTunes and Digg.com, it is often hard for astronomy content consumers (even the most tech savvy ones) to efficiently learn what's new, what's up, and what's on the horizon in the astronomical community. Laypeople, press, educators, decision-makers and even the scientists themselves deserve better access to astronomy content (press releases, blogs, images, videos, podcasts, background information etc...). As a community, we need a single point of entry into all the cosmic discoveries that take place on a daily basis — a global one-stop portal for astronomy-related resources. Modern technology and the standardization of metadata make it possible to tie all the suppliers of such information together with a single, almost self-updating portal. The Portal to the Universe (PTTU) seeks to provide a single gateway to online astronomy content, serving as an index, an aggregator, and a social networking site for astronomy content providers, users, and lovers. PTTU will feature: news-, image-, event- and video- aggregation; a comprehensive directory of observatories, facilities, astronomical societies, amateur astronomy societies, space artists, science communication universities; and Web 2.0 collaborative tools for astronomy multimedia community interaction such as ranking of the different services according to popularity. Additionally, a range of “widgets” (small applications) will be developed to tap live into the existing resources. The vision for the Portal is three-fold: - Enabling access: To aggregate (pull) from content providers incl. all astronomy-related dynamic content (e.g. RSS feeds of blogs, images, news, etc) and distribute (push) to the users;
- Index and archive: To collect and maintain a central repository of useful information, including resources such as educational materials and more, addresses for all astronomy stakeholders such as amateur clubs, planetariums, observatories etc.
- Enabling communication and collaboration: Create and maintain a network of all stakeholders incl. establishing a social network for all astronomy interested.
The PTTU homepage will feature a selection of these resources, with defaults based on editorial decisions based on assessing the target groups behaviour and needs, but will gradually move toward a live community-based selection determined by the real preferences of the visitors. The visitors may naturally tailor their own MyPortaltotheUniverse with the widgets that they wish. Editorially PTTU is a selective aggregator with a non-painful editorial mechanism in place. PTTU will have the latest stuff first.
Task group:
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(Denmark, ESA/Hubble & IAU) (chair)
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(Portugal, IYA2009/IAU, ESA/Hubble)
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(USA, LSST Corporation)
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(USA, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville)
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(Poland, Astronomia.pl)
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(Brazil, ESA/Hubble, IAU, IYA2009)
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(Denmark, ESA/Hubble)
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(Germany, Interstellarum Magazine)
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(USA, Universe Today)
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(UK, LCOGT, Cardiff University)
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(USA, NOAO) Files
 | Design Document from April 08, 2008 (PDF format, 1.95 MB)
| | Report from January 06, 2008 (pdf format, 633 KB)
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