The NASA Astrophysics Data System: Architecture

The powerful discovery capabilities available in the ADS bibliographic services are possible thanks to the design of a flexible search and retrieval system based on a relational database model. Bibliographic records are stored as a corpus of structured documents containing fielded data and metadata, while discipline-specific knowledge is segregated in a set of files independent of the bibliographic data itself. The creation and management of links to both internal and external resources associated with each bibliography in the database is made possible by representing them as a set of document properties and their attributes. To improve global access to the ADS data holdings, a number of mirror sites have been created by cloning the database contents and software on a variety of hardware and software platforms. The procedures used to create and manage the database and its mirrors have been written as a set of scripts that can be run in either an interactive or unsupervised fashion. The ADS can be accessed at http://adswww.harvard.eduComment: 25 pages, 8 figures, 3 table

Topic Maps as a Virtual Observatory tool

One major component of the VO will be catalogs measuring gigabytes and terrabytes if not more. Some mechanism like XML will be used for structuring the information. However, such mechanisms are not good for information retrieval on their own. For retrieval we use queries. Topic Maps that have started becoming popular recently are excellent for segregating information that results from a query. A Topic Map is a structured network of hyperlinks above an information pool. Different Topic Maps can form different layers above the same information pool and provide us with different views of it. This facilitates in being able to ask exact questions, aiding us in looking for gold needles in the proverbial haystack. Here we discuss the specifics of what Topic Maps are and how they can be implemented within the VO framework. URL: http://www.astro.caltech.edu/~aam/science/topicmaps/Comment: 11 pages, 5 eps figures, to appear in SPIE Annual Meeting 2001 proceedings (Astronomical Data Analysis), uses spie.st

Citing/Referencing

As rightly pointed out earlier, research ethics advises authors to avoid plagiarism. Citing the used references in scientific works is the best way of preventing plagiarism. There are some guidelines on the internet that helps authors to observe ethical writing tips. We cite others' works in many different ways. Firstly, we should know that what is the difference between a reference and citation and why we cite

Searching by approximate personal-name matching

We discuss the design, building and evaluation of a method to access theinformation of a person, using his name as a search key, even if it has deformations. We present a similarity function, the DEA function, based on the probabilities of the edit operations accordingly to the involved letters and their position, and using a variable threshold. The efficacy of DEA is quantitatively evaluated, without human relevance judgments, very superior to the efficacy of known methods. A very efficient approximate search technique for the DEA function is also presented based on a compacted trie-tree structure.Postprint (published version

World Religion Database

This article reviews the new database released by Brill entitled World Religion Database (WRD). It compares WRD to other religious demography tools available and rates the database on a 5 point scale

Assessment techniques, database design and software facilities for thermodynamics and diffusion

The purpose of this article is to give a set of recommendations to producers of assessed thermodynamic data, who may be involved in either the critical evaluation of limited chemical systems or the creation and dissemination of larger thermodynamic databases. Also, it is hoped that reviewers and editors of scientific publications in this field will find some of the information useful. Good practice in the assessment process is essential, particularly as datasets from many different sources may be combined together into a single database. With this in mind, we highlight some problems that can arise during the assessment process and we propose a quality assurance procedure. It is worth mentioning at this point, that the provision of reliable assessed thermodynamic data relies heavily on the availability of high quality experimental information. The different software packages for thermodynamics and diffusion are described here only briefly

Referencing Sources of Molecular Spectroscopic Data in the Era of Data Science: Application to the HITRAN and AMBDAS Databases

The application described has been designed to create bibliographic entries in large databases with diverse sources automatically, which reduces both the frequency of mistakes and the workload for the administrators. This new system uniquely identifies each reference from its digital object identifier (DOI) and retrieves the corresponding bibliographic information from any of several online services, including the SAO/NASA Astrophysics Data Systems (ADS) and CrossRef APIs. Once parsed into a relational database, the software is able to produce bibliographies in any of several formats, including HTML and BibTeX, for use on websites or printed articles. The application is provided free-of-charge for general use by any scientific database. The power of this application is demonstrated when used to populate reference data for the HITRAN and AMBDAS databases as test cases. HITRAN contains data that is provided by researchers and collaborators throughout the spectroscopic community. These contributors are accredited for their contributions through the bibliography produced alongside the data returned by an online search in HITRAN. Prior to the work presented here, HITRAN and AMBDAS created these bibliographies manually, which is a tedious, time-consuming and error-prone process. The complete code for the new referencing system can be found at \url{https://github.com/hitranonline/refs}.Comment: 11 pages, 5 figures, already published online at https://doi.org/10.3390/atoms802001

Which User Interaction for Cross-Language Information Retrieval? Design Issues and Reflections

A novel and complex form of information access is cross-language information retrieval: searching for texts written in foreign languages based on native language queries. Although the underlying technology for achieving such a search is relatively well understood, the appropriate interface design is not. This paper presents three user evaluations undertaken during the iterative design of Clarity, a cross-language retrieval system for rare languages, and shows how the user interaction design evolved depending on the results of usability tests. The first test was instrumental to identify weaknesses in both functionalities and interface; the second was run to determine if query translation should be shown or not; the final was a global assessment and focussed on user satisfaction criteria. Lessons were learned at every stage of the process leading to a much more informed view of what a cross-language retrieval system should offer to users

From local laboratory data to public domain database in search of indirect association of diseases: AJAX based gene data search engine.

This paper presents an extensible schema for capturing laboratory gene variance data with its meta-data properties in a semi-structured environment. This paper also focuses on the issues of creating a local and task specific component database which is a subset of global data resources. An XML based genetic disorder component database schema is developed with adequate flexibilities to facilitate searching of gene mutation data. A web based search engine is developed that allows researchers to query a set of gene parameters obtained from local XML schema and subsequently allow them to automatically establish a link with the public domain gene databases. The application applies AJAX (Asynchronous Javascript and XML), a cutting-edge web technology, to carry out the gene data searching function