The Digital Sky project is federating individual sky surveys into a comprehensive digital archive of the entire sky.
Various catalogs differ in resolution, accuracy, and limiting magnitude.
Work is proceeding on several fronts. Roy Williams at Caltech's Center for Advanced Computing Research is adapting these images, along with classical star maps, to the Virtual Sky educational resource. And Caltech researcher Robert Brunner is leading an effort to apply new cross-correlations to the federated catalogs. The challenge is compounded by the fact that various surveys have intrinsically different resolutions, coordinate systems, and data representations that must be reconciled. Digital Sky researchers, building upon earlier work done at IRSA, are now developing a more powerful approach that will utilize all available data to associate catalogued objects using a Bayesian approach to determine statistical probabilities of association.