Resumen
The article focuses on a new online way to see the global structure of the universe, the World-Wide Telescope, which promises to be not only a wonderful virtual telescope but an archetype for the evolution of computational science. The primary goal of the World-Wide Telescope is to make astronomers more productive, helping them better understand their data. The transformation poses special challenges for the database community, which will have to deal with huge data sets, richer data types and much more complex queries. Federating these archives is a good test of distributed systems technologies, including Web services and distributed object stores. The data mining community is also challenged by the huge size and high dimensionality of the data. Because the data is public, the World-Wide Telescope is also an excellent place to compare and evaluate data mining algorithms. The World-Wide Telescope challenges statisticians to develop algorithms that run fast on very large data sets. Finally, but perhaps most important, it can be a valuable resource for teaching the new astronomy, as well as for teaching computational science.