51 research outputs found
The NASA Astrophysics Data System: Data Holdings
Since its inception in 1993, the ADS Abstract Service has become an
indispensable research tool for astronomers and astrophysicists worldwide. In
those seven years, much effort has been directed toward improving both the
quantity and the quality of references in the database. From the original
database of approximately 160,000 astronomy abstracts, our dataset has grown
almost tenfold to approximately 1.5 million references covering astronomy,
astrophysics, planetary sciences, physics, optics, and engineering. We collect
and standardize data from approximately 200 journals and present the resulting
information in a uniform, coherent manner. With the cooperation of journal
publishers worldwide, we have been able to place scans of full journal articles
on-line back to the first volumes of many astronomical journals, and we are
able to link to current version of articles, abstracts, and datasets for
essentially all of the current astronomy literature. The trend toward
electronic publishing in the field, the use of electronic submission of
abstracts for journal articles and conference proceedings, and the increasingly
prominent use of the World Wide Web to disseminate information have enabled the
ADS to build a database unparalleled in other disciplines.
The ADS can be accessed at http://adswww.harvard.eduComment: 24 pages, 1 figure, 6 tables, 3 appendice
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
The NASA Astrophysics Data System: The Search Engine and its User Interface
The ADS Abstract and Article Services provide access to the astronomical
literature through the World Wide Web (WWW). The forms based user interface
provides access to sophisticated searching capabilities that allow our users to
find references in the fields of Astronomy, Physics/Geophysics, and
astronomical Instrumentation and Engineering. The returned information includes
links to other on-line information sources, creating an extensive astronomical
digital library. Other interfaces to the ADS databases provide direct access to
the ADS data to allow developers of other data systems to integrate our data
into their system.
The search engine is a custom-built software system that is specifically
tailored to search astronomical references. It includes an extensive synonym
list that contains discipline specific knowledge about search term
equivalences.
Search request logs show the usage pattern of the various search system
capabilities. Access logs show the world-wide distribution of ADS users.
The ADS can be accessed at http://adswww.harvard.eduComment: 23 pages, 18 figures, 11 table
The NASA Astrophysics Data System: Overview
The NASA Astrophysics Data System Abstract Service has become a key component
of astronomical research. It provides bibliographic information daily, or near
daily, to a majority of astronomical researchers worldwide.
We describe the history of the development of the system and its current
status.
We show several examples of how to use the ADS, and we show how ADS use has
increased as a function of time. Currently it is still increasing
exponentially, with a doubling time for number of queries of 17 months.
Using the ADS logs we make the first detailed model of how scientific
journals are read as a function of time since publication.
The impact of the ADS on astronomy can be calculated after making some simple
assumptions. We find that the ADS increases the efficiency of astronomical
research by 333 Full Time Equivalent (2000 hour) research years per year, and
that the value of the early development of the ADS for astronomy, compared with
waiting for mature technologies to be adopted, is 2332 FTE research years.
The ADS is available at http://adswww.harvard.edu/.Comment: 19 pages, 22 figure
Merging the Astrophysics and Planetary Science Information Systems
Conceptually exoplanet research has one foot in the discipline of
Astrophysics and the other foot in Planetary Science. Research strategies for
exoplanets will require efficient access to data and information from both
realms. Astrophysics has a sophisticated, well integrated, distributed
information system with archives and data centers which are interlinked with
the technical literature via the Astrophysics Data System (ADS). The
information system for Planetary Science does not have a central component
linking the literature with the observational and theoretical data. Here we
propose that the Committee on an Exoplanet Science Strategy recommend that this
linkage be built, with the ADS playing the role in Planetary Science which it
already plays in Astrophysics. This will require additional resources for the
ADS, and the Planetary Data System (PDS), as well as other international
collaboratorsComment: Whitepaper submitted to the Committee on an Exoplanet Science
Strateg
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