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Rots, A. H., Winkelman, S. L., Paltani, S., Blecksmith, S. E., & Bright, J. D. 2003, in ASP Conf. Ser., Vol. 314 Astronomical Data
Analysis Software and Systems XIII, eds. F. Ochsenbein, M. Allen, & D. Egret (San Francisco: ASP), 605
The Chandra Bibliography Database
Arnold H. Rots, Sherry L. Winkelman, Sarah E. Blecksmith,
John D. Bright
Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, 60 Garden Street
MS 67, Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.
Stéphane Paltani
Observatoire de Marseille
Abstract:
Early in the mission, the Chandra Data Archive started the development of a
bibliography database, tracking publications in refereed journals and
on-line conference proceedings that are based on Chandra observations,
allowing our users to link directly to articles in the ADS from our
archive, and to link to the relevant data in the archive from the ADS
entries. Subsequently, we have been working closely with the ADS and
other data centers, in the context of the ADEC-ITWG, on standardizing
the literature-data linking. We have also extended our bibliography
database to include all Chandra-related articles and we are also
keeping track of the number of citations of
each paper. Obviously, in addition to providing valuable services to
our users, this database allows us to extract a wide variety of
statistical information.
The project comprises five components: the bibliography database-proper,
a maintenance database, an interactive maintenance tool, a user
browsing interface, and a web services component for exchanging
information with the ADS. All of these elements are nearly
mission-independent and we intend make the package as a whole
available for use by other data centers. The capabilities thus
provided represent support for an essential component of the Virtual
Observatory.
For the past two years the Chandra Data Archive
(CDA) has been
building a database linking articles in the literature to Chandra
datasets being presented in those articles as a service to our own
users and to users of the
ADS.
Currently, on the side of the CDA users are
able to link from observations to articles in the ADS, while there
are also some links to scattered publications. On the part of the
ADS, users can link from articles presenting Chandra observations to
those datasets in the archive and select articles with general Chandra
mission tags.
These are valuable services but not as general as one would like and
very labor-intensive to maintain: to date humans have inspected 11,000
articles to be judged on relevance and manually made 2400 links between
the literature and the archive's datasets. The objective is to move
to a system where the links can be harvested automatically and users
are provided with access to data and published articles through the
ADS and through the data centers as illustrated in Fig. 1. We will
outline in the following sections the steps that will lead to such
improved user-friendliness.
Figure 1:
Planned query mechanisms to allow users flexible access to
data and publications.
 |
The ADS, the data centers, and the US journal editors are working on a
proposed agreement that will enable authors to insert links to
archived datasets directly into their manuscripts. These identifiers
will be IVOA (International Virtual Observatory Alliance) compliant
and consist of a name space (ivo:), an authority Id (ADS), a data
collection (e.g., Sa.CXO), and a dataset name. For more detailed
information, see Accomazzi & Eichhorn (2004).
The objective is to allow the data centers and the ADS to harvest the
links between the literature and the archived datasets automatically,
thus eliminating a large component of the labor that is currently
invested in bibliographic databases associated with archives.
Whereas our database originally only contained links between datasets
and the bibcodes of journal articles and conference proceeding papers
that presented these datasets, we have been extending it in three
directions. First, we now include five subject categories of papers:
referring to specific observations (the original database); referring
to published results; predicting Chandra results; referring to
instrumentation, software, or operations; other. Second, we now
include all other types of publications, with the exception of
preprints. We would be prepared to include Astro-ph articles if the
data identifier links could be harvested from that site; but it does
not seem likely that this will happen anytime soon. Third, we are
including a large variety of of attributes for each article in our
database, such as: subject category; kind of publication (book,
journal, proceedings, thesis, circular, review, newsletter, internal
note); type of publication (article, abstract, memo, data, erratum,
title only, electronic); number of citations; keywords; date of
publication; refereed or not.
To this end we have expanded our database to 10 tables:
- BibTable is the main table that holds one record for each
article with all simple attributes, some of them encoded.
- ObsId contains the links between bibcodes and single-observation
datasets. Each
ObsId may refer to more than one record in the BibTable and each
record in the BibTable may refer to more than one ObsId record.
ObsIds link to the observation catalog (a separate database) and to
proposals for more information.
- Subjects contains the description of the five encoded subject
categories.
- Datasets are conglomerates of observations that belong together
and are represented by a single identifier, rather than (potentially)
a large number of identifiers.
- DatasetObsIds enumerates the ObsIds contained in each Datasets
record.
- URLs provides a mapping between BibTable entries and articles
that are maintained as specific URLs.
- StdKeywords contains the standard keywords for each article.
- StdKeywordCategories holds the descriptions of the standard
journal keyword categories.
- StdKeywordList is the list of canonical standard keywords as
adopted by the major journals.
- CustomKeywords holds the keywords invented by individual
authors.
We manage the entry of new records into the bibliography database
through a dedicated database which is filled through automated queries
to the ADS database. Attributes are filled in through a GUI and the
entries are migrated to BibTable upon completion.
In addition, automated ADS queries update the number of citations for
each article and check the continued validity of all bibcodes.
Table 1 provides some statistics on our database as of ADASS XIII.
We are developing the following services:
- Exchange of information with the ADS, in particular the
harvesting of Bibcode-Dataset Identifier pairs in both directions.
- Provide access to datasets through either a Dataset Identifier
or a Bibcode.
- Provide information to the ADS on Bibcodes that are not related
to specific observations.
- Provide access to publications through queries from our
archive. We are developing a specialized literature query interface
related to the Chandra mission, allowing users to search for articles
on the basis of criteria that are specific to Chandra.
- Derive metrics through queries to the bibliography database
(standardized metrics as well as custom requests).
We have developed a comprehensive database design that is capable of
tracking almost all mission-related publications and preserving all
relevant information. Added to this are a database and GUI that make
maintenance, particularly data entry, as painless as possible. Our
services include cross-linking with the ADS, literature search
from our archive, and metrics.
The entire package is reasonably mission-independent and available to
other data centers.
References
Accomazzi, A. & Eichhorn, G.
2004, this volume, 181
© Copyright 2004 Astronomical Society of the Pacific, 390 Ashton Avenue, San Francisco, California 94112, USA
Next: Automated Determination of Stellar Population Parameters in Galaxies Using Active Instance-based Learning
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