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.

Partners:

• Dipartimento di Fisica (sezione di Astrofisica) - Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II
• INAF - Osservatorio Astronomico di Capodimonte
• California Institute of Technology, Pasadena - USA

Related links:

• VOTECH (Virtual Observatory Technological Infrastructures)
• S.Co.P.E. (high Performance distributed Cooperative System for scientific Experiment)
• INAF - Osservatorio Astronomico di Trieste (VO-AIDA)
• MIUR (Italian Ministry of Research)
• EURO-VO (The European Virtual Observatory)
• IVOA (International Virtual Observatory Alliance)

Astronomical Data are collected by means of a large number of different techniques and are stored in very diversified and often incompatible data repositories. Moreover in the e-science environment, it is needed to integrate services distributed across heterogeneous, dynamic “virtual organizations” formed by the different resources within a single enterprise and by external resource sharing and service provider relationships.

The DAME project aims at creating a single distributed e-infrastructure for data exploration, mining and visualization. It provides an integrated access to data collected by very different instruments, experiments and scientific communities in order to be able to correlate them and improve their scientific usability and interoperability.

The project consists in the design and development of a data mining suite which will provide the astronomical community with powerful software instruments able to work on massive data sets in a distributed computing environment, matching the international IVOA standards and requirements.

The DAME project effort is a service-oriented architecture, by using appropriate standards to match the resouce-oriented GRID paradigm.