Jordan Raddick

The SDSS skyserver: public access to the sloan digital sky server data

The SkyServer provides Internet access to the public Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) data for both astronomers and for science education. This paper describes the SkyServer goals and architecture. It also describes our experience operating the SkyServer on the Internet. The SDSS data is public and well-documented so it makes a good test platform for research on database algorithms and performance.

Make Research Data Public?—Not Always so Simple: A Dialogue for Statisticians and Science Editors

Putting data into the public domain is not the same thing as making those data accessible for intelligent analysis. A distinguished group of editors and experts who were already engaged in one way or another with the issues inherent in making research data public came together with statisticians to initiate a dialogue about policies and practicalities of requiring published research to be accompanied by publication of the research data. This dialogue carried beyond the broad issues of the advisability, the intellectual integrity, the scientific exigencies to the relevance of these issues to statistics as a discipline and the relevance of statistics, from inference to modeling to data exploration, to science and social science policies on these issues.

Analysis of web-related threats in ten years of logs from a scientific portal

SkyServer is an Internet portal to data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, the largest online archive of astronomy data in the world. provides free access to hundreds of millions of celestial objects for science, education and outreach purposes. Logs of accesses to SkyServer comprise around 930 million hits, 140 million web services accesses and 170 million SQL submitted queries, collected over the past 10 years. These logs also contain indications of compromise attempts on the servers. In this paper, we show some threats that were detected in ten years of stored logs, and compare them with known threats in those years. Also, we present an analysis of the evolution of those threats over these years.

Mining the SDSS SkyServer SQL queries log

SkyServer, the Internet portal for the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) astronomic catalog, provides a set of tools that allows data access for astronomers and scientific education. One of SkyServer data access interfaces allows users to enter ad-hoc SQL statements to query the catalog. SkyServer also presents some template queries that can be used as basis for more complex queries. This interface has logged over 330 million queries submitted since 2001. It is expected that analysis of this data can be used to investigate usage patterns, identify potential new classes of queries, find similar queries, etc. and to shed some light on how users interact with the Sloan Digital Sky Survey data and how scientists have adopted the new paradigm of e-Science, which could in turn lead to enhancements on the user interfaces and experience in general. In this paper we review some approaches to SQL query mining, apply the traditional techniques used in the literature and present lessons learned, namely, that the general text mining approach for feature extraction and clustering does not seem to be adequate for this type of data, and, most importantly, we find that this type of analysis can result in very different queries being clustered together.