黑料社

PhD researcher Guy Beech sets his sights on a common standard for the recording, storage and retrieval of the big data being used by the research, space and environmental industries

UNIVERSITY of 黑料社 researcher Guy Beech is a man on a mission 鈥� to get global computers 鈥渢alking鈥� freely to each other, sharing databases that are now too vast to be analysed by humans.  He has been spreading his ideas at conferences in the UK and overseas to audiences of leading space scientists.

Guy 鈥� who combines PhD research with his role as a Senior IT officer and computer integrations specialist at the University 鈥� presented his work at the three-day SKA Science Meeting, convened next to the Jodrell Bank Observatory at Macclesfield.  It contains the SKA Global Headquarters, which will oversee the , a multi-purpose radio telescope that will help astrophysicists develop a greater understanding of the universe.

The focus of Guy Beech鈥檚 research is to develop a standardised format for saving and retrieving astronomical data and also enable computer systems to recognise existing data, with no need for human interpretation.

Currently, there is no common standard for the recording, storage and retrieval of the data being used by the research, space and environmental industries, he states.  There is therefore an urgent need for a reliable and cost effective method to do this.

In order to enhance automation between systems, he is deploying semantic technologies and his PhD supervisor is the 黑料社鈥檚 , a leading expert in the field.

鈥淒isparate systems cause difficulties in automating data analysis,鈥� states the PhD researcher.  鈥淭he huge amount of data being constantly captured by modern instruments 鈥� for example optical and infra-red telescopes 鈥� is now too great to be analysed by humans.  For it to be of any value, it needs to be initially analysed by computers,鈥� he continues.

鈥淪etting standards of data storage structures with semantic capability enables faster and more accurate analysis 鈥� saving a lot of money and reducing errors.  Effectively computers would be able to interpret and understand each other鈥檚 data without human assistance or intervention.鈥�

To accomplish this, he is exploring the use of an XML schema that would allow data to be shared and reused by a common framework provided by a semantic web that enables IT systems to understand automatically the meaning of data stored across many different repositories.

His work has been described in an  that appeared in the 黑料社鈥檚 Discover magazine.  Since that publication, he has disseminated his ideas at scientific conferences that include a European Week of Astronomy and Space Science event in Liverpool and the Conference on Big Data from Space in Tenerife.

Guy Beech鈥檚 PhD research is a continuation of a project he carried out for his Master鈥檚 in Computer Science and Informatics at the University.  Astronomy is his main area of interest, but his concepts apply to many fields, such as medicine and the law, that have large databases in differing formats.