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Astronomical Data Analysis Software and Systems VII
ASP Conference Series, Vol. 145, 1998
R. Albrecht, R. N. Hook and H. A. Bushouse, e
Ö Copyright 1998 Astronomical Society of the Pacific. All rights reserved.
ds.
The CDS Information Hub
F. Genova, J.G. Bartlett, F. Bonnarel, P. Dubois, D. Egret, P. Fernique,
G. Jasniewicz, S. Lesteven, F. Ochsenbein and M. Wenger
CDS, Observatoire de Strasbourg, UMR CNRS 7550, 11 rue de
l'Universit’e, 67000 Strasbourg, France, Email:
question@astro.u­strasbg.fr
Abstract. The recent evolution of the CDS services is presented. Nav­
igation between the CDS services, SIMBAD, the catalogue service, the
VizieR catalogue browser and the Dictionary of nomenclature is devel­
oped, as well as graphic and image­based functionalities (SIMBAD, AL­
ADIN). Links are also developed with the electronic astronomical library,
from CDS, ADS and the Journal editors, together with innovative `tex­
tual' information retrieval services, on one side, and with data archives
from observatories and disciplinary data centers on the other, paving the
way towards a fully linked astronomy information system, in close collab­
oration with the other actors in the field.
The CDS develops information retrieval services which are widely used by
the worldwide astronomy community (e.g., Egret et al. 1995; Genova et al.
1996). The two main ones are SIMBAD, the reference database for the identifi­
cation and bibliography of astronomical objects, which contains nearly 1,550,000
objects, 4,400,000 object names and more than 95,000 references (in November
1997), and the catalogue service, with ftp retrieval of whole catalogues and the
VizieR catalogue Browser (Ochsenbein 1997). The CDS WWW service 1 gives
access to SIMBAD and the catalogue service/VizieR, and also to other informa­
tion such as the Dictionary of Nomenclature of celestial objects, developed for
many years by M.--C. Lortet and her collaborators (Lortet et al. 1994), now fully
maintained by CDS in collaboration with the Paris Observatory (DASGAL), the
StarPages, maintained by A. Heck (1997), or AstroWeb (Jackson et al. 1994).
Moreover, the CDS develops the ALADIN interactive sky atlas, with a dedicated
XWindow interface (e.g., Bonnarel et al. 1997).
The CDS services are evolving continuously, taking advantage of new tech­
nical possibilities, and taking into account the evolution of astronomy itself, with
new domains, new object types, etc, and also new large projects.
From the point of view of the database contents, a particular e#ort has been
made in recent years to improve the multiwavelength coverage of SIMBAD, with
for instance the inclusion of the IRAS catalogue and of the IUE log, and the
`cleaning' of the high energy data, from the earlier satellites to Einstein, to be
ready for the next generation of X­ray observatories. In parallel, about 90 jour­
1 http://cdsweb.u­strasbg.fr/CDS.html
470

The CDS Information Hub 471
nals are regularly scanned, in collaboration with the Institut d'Astrophysique de
Paris and the Paris (DASGAL) and Bordeaux Observatories: for instance, more
than 70 lists of objects observed by ROSAT published in journals have been in­
cluded in the database from this bibliography scanning. A large amount of work
over several years has also been devoted to the inclusion of new reference stellar
catalogues, PPM, CCDM, and the Hipparcos input and final catalogues, in the
context of the Hipparcos project, and to prepare the transition to a J2000.0 ref­
erence for object positions. In addition, the on--line distribution of the Hipparcos
final catalogues was implemented through VizieR, by agreement with ESA, in
May 1997.
The evolution towards electronic publication of journals has added an im­
portant new function to the catalogue service : it is now the depository of large
tables from papers, these tables being very often published in electronic form
only and accessible from the data centers (and on CD­ROMs for the American
Astronomical Society journals). In this context, the CDS builds the electronic ta­
bles for Astronomy and Astrophysics, as part of the journal publication process,
and installs on line the tables published on CD--ROMs by the American Astro­
nomical Society, by agreement with the editor. These tables are then shared
with the other Data Centers (ADC/GSFC, INASAN/Moscow, NAOJ/Tokyo,
the Observatory of Beijing, UICAA/Pune). The key feature for this collabora­
tion between data centers, and with the journal editors, is a common standard
description of tables, first proposed by CDS, and now shared with the other data
centers and the editors for their electronic tables. This byte--per--byte descrip­
tion of tables, allows an automated check of the quality of the table contents (in
addition to verification by the referee), on--line format change (e.g., ASCII to
FITS), etc.
From the technical point of view, the major evolution in the last years
has been the very rapid development of the WWW, which opens in particular
remarkable capabilities for navigation. The CDS has taken advantage of the
WWW, first, of course, to develop WWW versions of its services : SIMBAD
(1996), the catalogue service (1993), the Dictionary of Nomenclature. VizieR
has been directly designed for the WWW, and a detailed description of its recent
evolution is given in the companion paper by Ochsenbein (1997).
Navigation between the CDS services, and with external resources, has
been implemented. The aim is to complete the evolution from a set of several
di#erent CDS services, each with its own contents, user interface and method of
access, to an integrated CDS service giving access to the set of CDS information
retrieval tools, in a transparent way for the user (keeping however advanced
functionalities in dedicated interfaces if necessary).
A few examples:
. from object names in SIMBAD, to the corresponding Dictionary of nomen­
clature entry, which gives information about the origin of the name, access
to bibliographic information about the original paper, and to the list in
the catalogue service if it is there;
. from bibliography in SIMBAD, to the CDS bibliographic information, with
links to the Dictionary of Nomenclature, and/or to the CDS catalogue ser­

472 Genova et al.
vice, when applicable, to the full electronic paper when available from the
journal editor, and also to the ADS services for this reference (e.g., Eich­
horn 1997) -- reciprocally, ADS implements links to several CDS services,
the list of SIMBAD objects for one reference, or the tables in VizieR and
in the catalogue service;
. from table to table in the new version of VizieR;
. ...
Another important possibility with the WWW, is to implement relatively
easily graphics functionality. For instance, clickable charts are in a prototype
phase for SIMBAD, and will be developed in the future for VizieR. On the other
hand, a WWW version of ALADIN will progressively be implemented, as a first
step to allow the users to get an image of the sky from the other CDS services,
SIMBAD, VizieR, and also from the objects cited in texts (e.g., in abstracts),
and then with additional functionalities such as SIMBAD or catalogue overlay
on the images.
Links to external resources will certainly develop rapidly in the future. On
one hand, the first links between the CDS databases and distributed observatory
archives have been implemented in September/October 1997 : from SIMBAD
to HEASARC, for the objects having a `high--energy designation', and from
VizieR to the FIRST radio database. More links with other data archives will
be installed soon. On the other hand, as explained earlier, navigation between
the CDS databases and on--line bibliographic resources, the ADS and electronic
journals, is already well developed. This has certainly been facilitated by the
existence of a de facto standard for the description of bibliographic reference,
the bibcode, first defined by NED and SIMBAD and now widely used by the
ADS (Schmitz et al. 1995). Moreover, the implementation of the European
mirror copy of ADS at CDS, thanks to the support of the French Space Agency
CNES, together with that of a mirror copy of SIMBAD at CfA, has certainly
helped towards better integration of the CDS services and the ADS. In parallel,
the European mirror copy of the electronic Astrophysical Journal has also been
installed at CDS in June 1997. In this domain, innovative services are certainly
ahead, for instance new methods to retrieve `textual' information, such as the
Kohonen map method (Lestven et al. 1996), and also more links between the
text of articles and databases. For instance, links can be foreseen between object
names in the papers, and information about the object in SIMBAD or NED, or
images, for instance from the future ALADIN WWW service.
To maintain the set of links between the CDS services, and with external
services, a generic tool, the GLU (Fernique 1998), has been developed. This
tool is being tested in one of the AstroBrowse prototypes, as discussed in the
AstroBrowse BOF during the ADASS'97 meeting.
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The CDS Information Hub 473
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