# /programsandresearch/dss/gray.htm

originally: http://www.oclc.org/programsandresearch/dss/gray.htm

# The World-Wide Telescope:
A Prototype of the Digital Library

## Jim Gray, Ph.D.

Distinguished Engineer, Microsoft's Scaleable Servers Research Group
Manager, Microsoft's Bay Area Research Center (BARC)

May 17, 2004

9:00-9:30 am
Coffee and Pastries

9:30-11:00 am
Presentation and Q&A

OCLC Online Computer Library Center, Inc.
Kilgour Auditorium
6565 Frantz Road
Dublin, OH 43017-3395

As Manager of Microsoft's Bay Area Research Center (BARC), Jim Gray is working with the astronomy community to build the World-Wide Telescope, and has been active in building online databases such as TerraServer and SkyServer.

Integrating the world's astronomy data and research literature into an accessible single distributed database will result in the world's best telescope. In this endeavor, Dr. Gray has encountered many of the problems librarians have grappled with for centuries, such as curation, preservation, indexing, access, and summarization. "I don't need to tell [librarians] that the concept of a library is morphing to be an amalgam of text and data all integrated together. The Dublin Core is a major bedrock of this new library, but there are many other parts."

Jim Gray's presentation will provide an overview of the World-Wide Telescope effort from the perspective of a digital library, focusing on metadata, schema, curation, and preservation issues.

Jim Gray is a specialist in database and transaction processing. He holds doctorates from Berkeley (where he has been a McKay Fellow) and Stuttgart. He is a Member of the National Academy of Engineering, the American Academy of Arts and Science, and the National Academy of Science; a Fellow of the ACM; and Editor of the Morgan Kaufmann series on Data Management. In 1998, he received the ACM Turing Award. Jim Gray is a frequent lecturer, and often reviews application designs.

### Background information

- Jim Gray's home page
  http://research.microsoft.com/~Gray/

### Presentation resources

- The World Wide Telescope: A Prototype of the Digital Library (PPT:1.42MB/32slides)
- Audio (MP3:22MB/95min.)

### PDF version of the original announcement

- http://www.oclc.org/research/dss/pdf/gray.pdf (PDF:41K/1p.)