Our Vision:

Enabling access to astronomy multimedia resources - including news, blogs, images, videos, events, podcasts, vodcasts . . . Connecting people through content and an astronomy yellow pages . . .

Our Goals:

The Portal to the Universe seeks to provide a single gateway to online astronomy content, serving as an index and an aggregator. TPTTU will feature: news-, image-, blog- and video- aggregation; a comprehensive directory of observatories, facilities, astronomical societies, amateur astronomy societies, space artists, science communication university programs; and Web 2.0 collaborative tools for astronomy multimedia community interaction such as ranking of the different services according to popularity. Additionally, a range of widgets (small applications) will be developed to tap live into the existing resources.

Our vision for the Portal is three-fold:

1. Enabling access: To aggregate (pull) from content providers incl. all astronomy-related dynamic content (e.g. RSS feeds of blogs, images, news, etc) and distribute (push) to the users;
2. Index and archive: To collect and maintain a central repository of links to useful information, including resources such as educational materials and more, addresses for all astronomy stakeholders such as amateur clubs, planetariums, observatories etc.
3. Enabling communication and collaboration: Create and maintain a network of all stakeholders.

Task group:

• Lars Lindberg Christensen (Chair)
• Pamela Gay (Editor/Developer)
• Fraser Cain
• Daniel Fischer
• Edward Gomez
• Suzanne Jacoby
• Mark Newhouse
• Lars Holm Nielsen
• Jan Pomierny
• Pedro Russo
• Raquel Shida