The CDS information hub

The Centre de Donnees astronomiques de Strasbourg (CDS) provides homogeneousaccess to heterogeneous information of various origins: information aboutastronomical objects in Simbad; catalogs and observation logs in VizieR and inthe catalogue service; reference images and overlays in Aladin; nomenclature inthe Dictionary of Nomenclature; Yellow Page services; the AstroGLU resourcediscovery tool; mirror copies of other reference services; and documentation.With the implementation of links between the CDS services, and with otheron--line reference information, CDS has become a major hub in the rapidlyevolving world of information retrieval in astronomy, developing efficienttools to help astronomers to navigate in the world-wide `Virtual Observatory'under construction, from data in the observatory archives to results publishedin journals. The WWW interface to the CDS services is available at:http://cdsweb.u-strasbg.fr

Automatic Recognition of Object Names in Literature

International audienceSIMBAD is a database of astronomical objects that provides (among other things) their bibliographic references in a large number of journals. Currently, these references have to be entered manually by librarians who read each paper. To cope with the increasing number of papers, CDS develops a tool to assist the librarians in their work, taking advantage of the Dictionary of Nomenclature of Celestial Objects, which keeps track of object acronyms and of their origin. The program searches for object names directly in PDF documents by comparing the words with all the formats stored in the Dictionary of Nomenclature. It also searches for variable star names based on constellation names and for a large list of usual names such as Aldebaran or the Crab. Object names found in the documents often correspond to several astronomical objects. The system retrieves all possible matches, displays them with their object type given by SIMBAD, and lets the librarian make the final choice. The bibliographic reference can then be automatically added to the object identifiers in the database. Besides, the systematic usage of the Dictionary of Nomenclature, which is updated manually, permitted to automatically check it and to detect errors and inconsistencies. Last but not least, the program collects some additional information such as the position of the object names in the document (in the title, subtitle, abstract, table, figure caption...) and their number of occurrences. In the future, this will permit to calculate the ’weight’ of an object in a reference and to provide SIMBAD users with an important new information, which will help them to find the most relevant papers in the object reference list

Subtyping of emm1 Group A Streptococci Causing Invasive Infections in France ▿

By combining PCR amplification of toxin-encoding genes and sic gene sequencing, we distinguished 24 genotypes among 47 M/emm1 group A streptococci isolated from children and adults in France in 9 cases of infection comprising four clusters and 38 unrelated invasive infection cases used as controls

Ontologies for Astronomy

International audienceOntologies are used in many application domains to organize information and described knowledge. Classifications and thesauri define concepts and relationships in a systematic manner and the ontologies are mainly used due to their ability to specify the semantics and relations between concepts and to express them in a computer understandable language. Astronomers regularly use information networks made up of electronic journal articles, databases and catalog servers. To go further, we are working on the definition of an ontology which would give intelligent access to the heterogeneous astronomical resources. This ontology will be used for different tasks such as intelligent information retrieval based on the content of documents and information manipulation for matching and comparing the content of these astronomical documents

Interoperability Tools and Standards at CDS

International audienceInteroperability between heterogeneous, distributed services, is one of the key features of the Virtual Observatory. CDS develops widely used interoperability tools, VizieR and Aladin. Tabular data, catalogues, published tables, surveys, and lists of observations in archives, are federated in VizieR, with active links to data, images, spectra and time series, for instance with links to archives such as HST, CFHT and ISO. Aladin gives access to images and to tabular data. In addition to data held at CDS, databases such as NED and SIMBAD, and links from VizieR, additional resources can be described through the GLU (Générateur de Liens Uniformes). A set of exchange standards have been discussed by consortia of potential users: ASU - Astronomical Server URL, to generate queries; astrores, XML description of catalogues and query results. astrores is put in action in HEASARC Browse and IRSA OASIS. In addition, an XML description of SIMBAD is in preparation, and an XML frame for image data sets, taking into the FITS expertise, is discussed. On the other hand, the UCDs (Uniform Column Descriptor), developed in the frame of the ESO/CDS Data Mining project, are prototypes of metadata categorizing catalogue contents. They will be used for data mining purposes, and open the way for automated conversion of parameters. A prototype of interoperability between representative ground-based and space archives (ESO, ESA, UK archives from AstroGRID, Terapix, Jodrell Bank), based on VizieR and Aladin, is being implemented in the frame of the Astronomical Virtual Observatory project, recently selected by the European Commission