Department of Computer Science Colloquium
Wednesday, October 2, 2002, 2:30pm 
255 Olin Hall

Can Databases Help Science?

Jim Gray
Microsoft Research Center

ABSTRACT: I have been putting Astronomy data into a database and then helping astronomers use it to answer science questions. This talk will describe (1) how we designed the database, (2) how we use the database to do data mining, (3) some interesting algorithms for spherical geometry in SQL. Then I will briefly Touch on the World-Wide Telescope effort of federating all the world's astronomy archives into a single database accessible via the Internet.