19th International CODATA Conference
Category: Open Communication

Information networking and integration: collaboration between data centres and academic journals

F. Genova (CDS) (genova@astro.u-strasbg.fr ), C. Bertout (Astronomy & Astrophysics), F. Ochsenbein (CDS), and S. Lesteven (CDS)
Observatoire astronomique, France

Astronomy is at the forefront for data conservation and distribution, and also for information networking, thanks to early definition of de facto disciplinary standards, on-line availability of observatory archives, and collaboration between archive providers, data centres and peer-reviewed journals. The current astronomy information network already allows scientists to surf from observations to results published in journals, and includes value-added information services.

Collaboration between data centres (CDS and NED) led to an early definition of a disciplinary standard to describe bibliographic information, long before the Web age. This standard is widely used and maintained by the Astrophysics Data System (the reference bibliographic service for astronomy) and the data centres. Astronomy services have now to implement a smooth transition from their disciplinary standard to the general standard DOI, defined since then by publishers.

The implementation of journals on the Web has also opened  new possibilities for the scientific usage of published results, and also new types of content validation, complementary to the referee's one, and to the layout performed by publishers. For instance, the European journal "Astronomy & Astrophysics" decided as early as 1993 to publish 'long' tables in electronic form at CDS, included in a catalogue service together with reference astronomy catalogues. The standard description of tables is now shared by other journals, in particular by the journals of the American Astronomical Society (AAS). This means that published tabular information can be used by scientist exactly as they use, e.g., lists of objects observed in large surveys. The standard description also allows CDS to check the validity of table contents.

In addition, authors publishing in "Astronomy & Astrophysics" are able since several years to tag the names of astronomical objects in their papers. A link controlled and maintained by CDS is then built to the data about the object contained in the SIMBAD database. This can be a complex procedure, due to the extreme diversity of nomenclature in astronomy, and tools are offered to authors to check the validity of object names in their papers. The AAS is developing a similar functionality for its journals, which can also be found in New Astronomy.

One key question for the Virtual Observatory, is to find a proper way of describing the semantic content of information. One important knowledge base in that respect is built from the journal keywords. Other knowledge bases (thesaurus, Uniform Content Descriptors, ...) also exist and a preliminary action is under way to compare some of them with the possible goal to build one or several astronomy ontologies (Project Massive Data in Astronomy).