The SDSS Legacy: Call for Proposals
Juna Kollmeier The Carnegie Observatories
The Steering Committee for After Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) IV (AS4) seeks proposals for long-term data distribution and public engagement with SDSS data. Proposals will be due Friday, 23 September 2016. These proposals will be reviewed by the Steering Committee and successful proposals will be put before the Astrophysical Research Consortium (ARC) Board in November.
Data Management and Long Term Archiving
One of the triumphs of the SDSS I-IV enterprise has been the curation of an extensive, easily accessible, and user-friendly data archive and associated data products, distributed with fully integrated education and public engagement initiatives. Proposals should address the distribution of the full legacy data set, accommodating the existence or not of new data from an AS4 program. They should address how the long-term data archiving and distribution will be achieved.
Education and Public Outreach
SDSS has played a crucial role in citizen science efforts, science education, and public engagement. The data distribution platforms have been integral to the success of these programs. Proposals should address how the plans will directly support, expand, and enable continuing efforts in this area.
Preparing your Proposal
The proposals should identify an overall Principal Investigator (PI), a list of Co-Principal Investigators, and a list of team members (along with institutional and contact information for all individuals). A full proposal must answer the questions:
- At what locations will the SDSS data be located?
- What support exists at those locations for long-term (decades) archiving and distribution?
- What will the SDSS archive contain?
- What is its total capacity?
- What are the enduser and programmatic interfaces?
- What are the survey software developer interfaces?
- What are the archival data integrity requirements?
- What software and software management systems will it use?
- How will software sustainability be ensured?
- What are the target audiences?
- What sorts of documentation will it have?
- What educational components will it have?
- What public engagement components will it have?
In answering these questions, the proposal must also describe how the system will fulfill the following requirements:
- Free to anyone
- Documented
- Backed up with fail over capability
- Monitors data integrity
- Has a human user interface
- Has a programmatic interface
- Maintains backward compatibility
- Supports new data and reductions
- Based on version controlled, opensource software
- Observes configuration management and quality assurance procedures
- Has a help desk
- Supports education and public outreach activities
- Monitors usage
- Monitors success metrics
- Has a governance structure.
- Has a responsible PI
- Maintained over at least 6 years beyond SDSS-IV.
A full proposal must include a detailed budget and identify potential funding paths:
- What is the construction and operations budget for the system in detail?
- How do the proposed activities scale under optimistic, realistic and pessimistic funding profiles?
- What is the marginal cost of incorporating data from continued observations?
- What institutional contributions could be available to offset this budget? Note that a formal commitment is not necessary at the time of the proposal.
- What specific fundraising opportunities are available at the federal level or through other means for this system or any of its subsystems?
Submitting your Proposal
We encourage the proposals to be concise and anticipate that the answers to the above questions will require approximately 20 pages in total length and must be emailed as a single PDF document to [email protected]. Review of proposals will begin after 23 September 2016.
Proposer Resources
Information for proposal writers will be made available at sdss.org/future. Teams are welcome to consult with members of the AS4 Steering Committee with questions regarding the scope and content of the proposal.
Juna Kollmeier (Carnegie Observatories, Chair)
Conny Aerts (KU Leuven/Radboud)
Scott Anderson (UW)
Matthew Bershady (University of Wisconsin)
Michael Blanton (NYU)
Daniel Eisenstein (Harvard)
Dani Maoz (TAU)
Hans-Walter Rix (MPIA)
Connie Rockosi (UC Santa Cruz)
David Weinberg (Ohio State)
Bruce Gillespie (ARC, Ex-Officio)
Rene Walterbos (ARC, Ex-Officio)