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Overview
With it, the user can discover and explore data resources, query remote catalogs, invoke remote processing tasks and construct workflows to automate tasks.
Key Features
Workbench provides the following features:
- Astroscope answers the question - what data is there available for any patch on the night sky?
- Helioscope answers the question - what Solar System data is available for a given time range?
- Task Launcher provides an easy way to query a wide range of astrophysical databases. Thus one can retrieve all stars with a certain colour from the Sloan All Sky Survey, or Brown Dwarfs from the UKIDSS WFCAM infrared survey.
- Task Launcher also enables a scientist to run a wide range of applications, such as Sextractor & Pegase, and return results in standard VO formats (such as VOTable)
Results may be saved to the user's MySpace, or to their local disk. For seamless analysis of results Workbench can pass data, via PLASTIC to viewers such as TopCat, Aladin & VOSpec.
The
Workbench can also be driven programatically using the Astro Runtime which, for instance, allows
the astronomer to perform queries from Python scripts.
Implementation
Workbench is a Java application that will run on Windows, OS X, Linux & Solaris.