The Office of Astronomy for Development (OAD) is a joint project of the International Astronomical Union (IAU) and the South African National Research Foundation (NRF) with the support of the Department of Science and Technology (DST). The mission of the OAD is to help further the use of astronomy, including its practitioners, skills and infrastructures, as a tool for development by mobilizing the human and financial resources necessary in order to realize the field’s scientific, technological and cultural benefits to society.
The OAD primarily carries out its mission by funding and coordinating projects that use astronomy as a tool to address issues related to sustainable development. Since 2013, more than 120 projects have been funded through the annual Call for Proposals.
The team behind the scenes that has designed and developed the service include the following people.
For any queries on the content, please contact the OAD team at info@astro4dev.org . For any IT related issues, please contact voi@iucaa.in
Each OAD project has tried to impact on sustainable development in various ways, applying astronomy to respond to local conditions and requirements. Projects have also encountered challenges unique to their region all of which are documented in reports. We believe the resources created by these projects, such as educational materials for schools, university lecture presentations and videos, tactile resources, project reports etc., will be beneficial to others who want to run astronomy outreach or education or for-development projects.
This interface enables you to search through materials produced by our past funded projects. You may specify keywords in the primary search box. You can further narrow the search results using the filters for Project Title, Location, Year (of project implementation), and SDG (View the Sustainable Development Goals)
After a detailed analysis of the nature of problems being faced by the OAD and subsequent detailed investigation, Alfresco was chosen as a platform for content management. However, as an Enterprise Content Management system, Alfresco is designed for content to be curated and accessed by members of the organization. To enable access to general public, this web application was built. It acts as an intermediary between the Alfresco system and the end user.
The search requests provided by the users are translated into low level calls that are relayed to the internal Alfresco system. Alfresco's powerful search utilities then process the search and return the results. These results are translated by our service into human readable web pages with facilities to explore more and download the content as required.