Introducing VOGCLUSTERS

Dear friends, while it may seems that the gclusters project (The Galactic Globular Clusters Database) has not been interested by much activities lately, as a matter of fact we have worked setting the stage for a big improvement: gclusters is on its way to became a real web application. This means that a lot of new feature will be implemented, such as the possibility (for registered users) to submit information in the database, an extensive and complete system to perform searches, a lot of more data available online, etc..

The web application (codename VOGCLUSTERS) is being developed under the DAME Project (in particular, see the DAME Science page): “DAME (DAta Mining & Exploration) is a project aimed at designing and developing instruments and tools for scientific data mining, based on information and comunication technology. DAME is an evolution of the Astroneural and VO-Neural projects and is funded by the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs as well as by the European project VOTECH (Virtual Observatory Technological Infrastructures) and by the Italian PON-S.Co.P.E.” (from DAME webpage).

In the past months, I had several contacts with the kind people of the DAME Working group , and I’m extremely  satisfied about their work on the project, which is now in an advanced phase of realisation (we have defined a complete and detailed document about Software Requirement Specification, and the work on the webpages is already started).

I’ll use this blog to keep you updated about the status of VOGCLUSTERS; meanwhile, as you may understand, I do not plan to make major improvements in the current implementation of gclusters (which anyway well remain online and fully operative). If you desire more detailed information, you’re invited to contact me (let a comment in this blog, in case)

Needless to say, I’m quite excited about the upcoming steps for gclusters/VOGCLUSTERS… 😉

Marco Castellani