Web-based Tools -— NED VO Services

The NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database (NED) is a thematic, web-based research facility in widespread use by scientists, educators, space missions, and observatory operations for observation planning, data analysis, discovery, and publication of research about objects beyond our Milky Way galaxy. NED is a portal into a systematic fusion of data from hundreds of sky surveys and tens of thousands of research publications. The contents and services span the entire electromagnetic spectrum from gamma rays through radio frequencies, and are continuously updated to reflect the current literature and releases of large-scale sky survey catalogs. NED has been on the Internet since 1990, growing in content, automation and services with the evolution of information technology. NED is the world‛s largest database of crossidentified extragalactic objects. As of December 2006, the system contains approximately 10 million objects and 15 million multi-wavelength cross-IDs. Over 4 thousand catalogs and published lists covering the entire electromagnetic spectrum have had their objects cross-identified or associated, with fundamental data parameters federated for convenient queries and retrieval. This chapter describes the interoperability of NED services with other components of the Virtual Observatory (VO). Section 1 is a brief overview of the primary NED web services. Section 2 provides a tutorial for using NED services currently available through the NVO Registry. The “name resolver” provides VO portals and related internet services with celestial coordinates for objects specified by catalog identifier (name); any alias can be queried because this service is based on the source cross-IDs established by NED. All major services have been updated to provide output in VOTable (XML) format that can be accessed directly from the NED web interface or using the NVO registry. These include access to images via SIAP, Cone- Search queries, and services providing fundamental, multi-wavelength extragalactic data such as positions, redshifts, photometry and spectral energy distributions (SEDs), and sizes (all with references and uncertainties when available). Section 3 summarizes the advantages of accessing the NED “name resolver” and other NED services via the web to replace the legacy “server mode” custom data structure previously available through a function library provided only in the C programming language. Section 4 illustrates visualization via VOPlot of an SED and the spatial distribution of sources from a NED All-Sky (By Parameters) query. Section 5 describes the new NED Spectral Archive, illustrating how VOTables are being used to standardize the data and metadata as well as the physical units of spectra made available by authors of journal articles and producers of major survey archives; quick-look spectral analysis through convenient interoperability with the SpecView (STScI) Java applet is also shown. Section 6 closes with a summary of the capabilities described herein, which greatly simplify interoperability of NED with other components of the VO, enabling new opportunities for discovery, visualization, and analysis of multiwavelength data

Web-based Tools for the Analysis of DNA Microarrays

End of project reportDNA microarrays are widely used for gene expression profiling. Raw data resulting from microarray experiments, however, tends to be very noisy and there are many sources of technical variation and bias. This raw data needs to be quality assessed and interactively preprocessed to minimise variation before statistical analysis in order to achieve meaningful result. Therefore microarray analysis requires a combination of visualisation and statistical tools, which vary depending on what microarray platform or experimental design is used.Bioconductor is an existing open source software project that attempts to facilitate analysis of genomic data. It is a collection of packages for the statistical programming language R. Bioconductor is particularly useful in analyzing microarray experiments. The problem is that the R programming language’s command line interface is intimidating to many users who do not have a strong background in computing. This often leads to a situation where biologists will resort to using commercial software which often uses antiquated and much less effective statistical techniques, as well as being expensively priced. This project aims to bridge this gap by providing a user friendly web-based interface to the cutting edge statistical techniques of Bioconductor

Chapter 8: Web-based Tools—CARNIVORE

Registries are an integral part of the VO infrastructure, yet the greatest exposure that most users will ever need to have to one is discovering resources through a registry portal. Some users, however, will have resources of their own that they need to register and will go to an existing registry to do so, but a small number will want to set up their own registry. They may have too many resources to register with an existing registry; they may want more control over their resource metadata than an existing registry will afford; or they may want to set up a specialized registry, e.g. a subjectspecific one. CARNIVORE is designed to offer those who want their own registry the functionality they require in an off-the-shelf implementation. This chapter describes how to set up your own registry using CARNIVORE

Managing the Reference Desk Online

Communication between reference librarians is vital for the provision of enhanced reference services. This article discusses the creation and application of three Web-based tools that allow librarians to offer quick answers to questions posed on the library’s e-mail reference service, to easily share news and ideas with each other between reference desk shifts, and to be actively involved in the scheduling of reference desk shifts

Chapter 11: Web-based Tools—VO Region Inventory Service

As the size and number of datasets available through the VO grows, it becomes increasingly critical to have services that aid in locating and characterizing data pertinent to a particular scientific problem. At the same time, this same increase makes that goal more and more difficult to achieve. With a small number of datasets, it is feasible to simply retrieve the data itself (as the NVO DataScope service does). At intermediate scales, “count” DBMS searches (searches of the actual datasets which return record counts rather than full data subsets) sent to each data provider will work. However, neither of these approaches scale as the number of datasets expands into the hundreds or thousands. Dealing with the same problem internally, IRSA developed a compact and extremely fast scheme for determining source counts for positional catalogs (and in some cases image metadata) over arbitrarily large regions for multiple catalogs in a fraction of a second. To show applicability to the VO in general, this service has been extended with indices for all 4000+ catalogs in CDS Vizier (essentially all published catalogs and source tables). In this chapter, we will briefly describe the architecture of this service, and then describe how this can be used in a distributed system to retrieve rapid inventories of all VO holdings in a way that places an insignificant load on any data supplier. Further, we show and this tool can be used in conjunction with VO Registries and catalog services to zero in on those datasets that are appropriate to the user’s needs. The initial implementation of this service consolidates custom binary index file structures (external to any DBMS and therefore portable) at a single site to minimize search times and implements the search interface as a simple CGI program. However, the architecture is amenable to distribution. The next phase of development will focus on metadata harvesting from data archives through a standard program interface and distribution of the search processing across multiple service providers for redundancy and parallelization

Applying Web-Based Tools for Research, Engineering, and Operations

Personnel in the NASA Glenn Research Center Network and Architectures branch have performed a variety of research related to space-based sensor webs, network centric operations, security and delay tolerant networking (DTN). Quality documentation and communications, real-time monitoring and information dissemination are critical in order to perform quality research while maintaining low cost and utilizing multiple remote systems. This has been accomplished using a variety of Internet technologies often operating simultaneously. This paper describes important features of various technologies and provides a number of real-world examples of how combining Internet technologies can enable a virtual team to act efficiently as one unit to perform advanced research in operational systems. Finally, real and potential abuses of power and manipulation of information and information access is addressed