Many departments in the governmental organization including Ministry of Science & Technology (MOST) allocate some of their budget into research and development in astronomy and space science. We identify the research projects related to astronomy and space science that were funded by the government during fiscal years 2004-2005. Then the distribution of budgets of those projects is analyzed according to several classification schemes and characteristics in order to find out the status and trends of the investment in this field. Five departments had conducted more than 190 projects related to astronomy and space science, which accounted for 7.3% of the government R&D budget in space and aeronautics area. As for most fields of basic science, MOST and Ministry of Education & Human Resources Development invested the most of budget in astronomy related projects. We briefly discuss the implications of this study.

In this paper, we analyze the scientific inquiries type on Almanac and Historical Astronomy asked through the Q&A service in Korea Astronomy and Science Institute(KASI) webpage with the aid of scientific inquiries analysis methods. We also study the contents of the questions. Specifically, we have created statistics of questions and inquiries, and have developed categories to analyze the characteristics of questions with regard to their cognitive aspects. Each question is categorized as either of the two elements based on their recognitive aspect: science knowledge or science study. Each element also has sub-categories that help the reader understand the characteristics of the questions. For the analysis, we used the sample consisting of questions collected from April, 2005 to June, 2007. Through this study, we achieved a better understanding of the questions in the area of Almanac and Historical Astronomy asked in the Q&A service. Throughout this study, we find that the need of questions in the area of Almanac and Historical Astronomy are increasing with time, and the overall quality of the questions is getting improved. As we expect that the number of people using our Q&A service will increase and that the questions will get more difficult to answer, development of improved contents is required.

The Korean Astronomical Data Center(KADC) in Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute(KASI) has developed a database of astronomical journals published by the Korean Astronomical Society and the Korean Space Science Society. It consists of all bibliographic records of the Journal of the Korean Astronomical Society(JKAS), Publication of the Korean Astronomical Society(PKAS), and Journal of Astronomy & Space Sciences(JASS). The KADC provides useful search functions in the search page such as search criterion of bibcode, publication date, author names, title words, or abstract words. The journal name is one of the search criterion in which more than one journal can be designated at the same time. The criterion of author name is provided bilingually: English or Korean. The abstract and full text can be downloaded as PDF files. It is also possible to search papers related to a specific research topic published in Korean astronomical journals, provided by the KADC, which often cannot be found the worldwide, Astrophysics Data System(ADS) services. The KADC will become basic infrastructure for the systematic construction of bibliographic records, and hence, make the society of Korean astronomers more interactive and collaborative.

An archiving system designed to enable documenting database of astronomical images, with functions of search and download, is being developed by Korean Astronomical Data Center(KADC) of Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute(KASI). The system consists of three PCs for web server, database server, and system management server. The search program for the web environment is operated in the web server. In the management server, several utility program we developed are installed: input program for the database, program for transfer from fits to jpg files, program for data recovery and management, and programs for statistics and connect management. The collected data would be sorted out by the system manager to input into the database. The online input is possible in an observatory where the data is produced. We applied the content management system(CMS) module for the database management. On the basic of CMS module, we set up a management system for the whole life cycle of metadata from creation and collection to storage and deletion of the data. For the search function, we employed a technique to extract indices from the metadata. In addition, MySQL is adopted for DBMS. We currently display about 2,700 and 25,000 photographs for astronomical phenomena and astronomical objects on the data, respectively.

We collected eleven large astronomical catalogues, which include 2MASS, USNO B1.0, GSC 2 catalogues and so on. Most of these catalogues are the frequently used by astronomers for all sorts of applications. But the researches are faced with the problem of accessing these databases because these catalogues contain from tens millions up to thousands of millions of records. So we developed a web application system to manage these large catalogues, the main purpose of the web application is to allow a powerful and efficient querying activity on these catalogues through internet by using a simple web interface. User could retrieve the query result in variety of formats including plain text, HTML, Microsoft Excel format (XLS), and VOTable. Furthermore, user also could display and analyze result graphically by using a powerful interactive visualization tools named VOPlot which was developed by the Virtual Observatory-India (VOI) project.

The First Generation Digitized Sky Survey (DSS-I) is a collection of digitized photographic atlases of the night sky taken from the Palomar Observatory (northen sky) and the Anglo-Australian Observatory (southern sky). DSS-I is widely used by the astronomical community for a number of applications including object cross-identification and astrometry. However, accessing and retrieving the actual images are nontrivial owing to the huge size (> 60 GB) of the dataset. To facilitate retrieval process of DSS-I data for the public, Korean Astronomical Data Center (KADC) developed a web application that provides not only data retrieval but also visualization functions. The web application consists of several modules developed using Java Applet, Jave Servlet, and JaveServer Pages (JSP) technologies. It allows users to retrieve images efficiently in various formats such as FITS, JPEG, GIF, and TIFF, and also offers an interactive visulization tool, ImgViewer, for displaying/analyzing FITS images. To use the web application, users require a Java-enabled web browser.

본 논문에서는 한국천문연구원에서 2000년부터 운영중인 홈페이지 질문상자의 질문 및 조회 수를 통계적으로 분석하고, 그 질문 내용에 나타난 인지적 측면에서 과학탐구 유형을 분석하였다. 이를 위해 홈페이지 질문상자에 올라온 질문 및 조회 수를 월별/연도별로 통계를 작성하였으며, 질문문항이 과학탐구의 어떠한 인지적 측면이 부각되어 있는가를 분석하기 위하여 과학탐구 분석틀을 개발하였다. 질문유형 분석은 인지적 측면에서 과학지식과 과학탐구로 분류하였다. 과학적 지식의 하위유형으로 내용지식, 방법지식, 지식본성 이해로 분류하였다. 과학탐구의 하위 요소는 과학탐구 수행능력으로 분류하고 각 세부 요소를 고려하였다. 질문유형 분석틀에 따른 과학탐구 유형의 분석은 분석틀을 통해, 2004년 7월부터 12월까지 6개월간 질문상자에 질문한 703개 질문 항목에 대해 질문들의 세부 사항 및 속성들을 세부적으로 살펴서 질문유형 분석틀에 따라 분석을 시행하였다. 이 분석을 통하여 질문상자의 질문에 대한 이해와 잦은 질문들에 대한 응답을 마련하는 등, 앞으로 질문상자의 운영 방안에 대한 방향을 설정할 수 있었다. 이 분석을 통해 질문수의 증가와 함께, 질문의 내용도 일상생활 과학 지식수준을 넘어 해마다 난해해 지고 전문화 되어가고 있음을 알 수 있었다. 앞으로 질문상자의 이용자 수가 계속 증가될 것으로 예상되고, 지적 요구의 증대와 함께, 질문의 내용도 더욱 난해해 질 것으로 예상됨으로 심도 있는 콘텐츠의 개발이 필요하다.