automated source lists

I spent all day at the Spitzer Science Center, reviewing their plans (still tentative) for a heritage-archive source list, or set of heterogeneous catalogs built from the imaging to support object-based and statistical searches of image contents. If they do this, they have to do it very much hands free because the data set is huge. That wouldn't be such a problem (SDSS was done hands free) but of course they also have to deal with the fact that there are many different observing programs, exposure times, dither patterns, and field characteristics, including diffuse emission, and etc. The plans so far are excellent; they really impressed me, as they always do at the SSC. It got me thinking once again about my polemic on probabilistic catalogs and image modeling. (I think this post violates The Rules.)