Alex Szalay (The Johns Jopkins University)
The Sloan Digital Sky Survey, hereafter the SDSS, is a project to digitally map about 1/2 of the Northern sky in five filter bands from UV to the near IR, and is expected to detect over 200 million objects in this area. Simultaneously, redshifts will be measured for the brightest 1 million galaxies. The SDSS will revolutionize the field of astronomy, increasing the amount of information available to researchers by several orders of magnitude. The resultant archive that will be used for scientific research will be large (exceeding several Terabytes) and complex: textual information, derived parameters, multi-band images, and spectra. The catalog will allow astronomers to study the evolution of the universe in greater detail and is intended to serve as the standard reference for the next several decades.