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The Taiwan Extragalactic Astronomical Data Center (TWEA-DC)

The next generation of telescopes and instruments are facilitating our understanding of the Universe by producing data at a pace that beats all projections, and astronomers today are left in the face of an avalanche of data like never before. In order to cope with this problem and come up with a reliable and innovative solution, Data Centers were created in various locations and the concept of Virtual Observatories elaborated. Based at the National Taiwan Normal University, the Taiwan Extragalactic Astronomical Data Center plan to join in global efforts by proposing 1Pb of data storage dedicated to extragalactic astronomy by 2015. In continuation with individual efforts in Taiwan over the past few years, this is the first stepping-stone towards the building of a National Virtual Observatory. Besides the common functionalities generally provided by data centers, our goal is to propose "on-the-fly" photometry measurements from publicly available surveys: a unique way for cross-matching information. Also we will propose access to raw and reducible data available from archives worldwide, a goldmine of under-exploited information. Finally, we will propose our own specific analysis tools available on-line through a user-friendly interface. Purchased very recently, the current Data Storage Unit is capable of accumulating up to 50Tb of data. In the first phase, we will focus on multiband catalog cross-matching and make the latest extragalactic datasets available to the world- wide community, which should be fully functional in 2011.