Describing Facilities, Telescopes and Instruments in common framework

This is a common effort initiated in the Semantics working group, namely with suggestions from Planetary science services at Paris Obseervatory and collaborators.

The idea is to identify and gather needs for a homogeneized description and identification of instruments, telescopes, space missions, space crafts, etc. and create a maintained repository of identifiers re-usable by the community for

- keywords verifications in data sets serialisation

- data citation

- facilicity citations tracing

etc...

Existing Initiatives

For specific type of objects:

Initiative from VESPA for planetology - Baptiste Cecconi

VESPA observatory facility database: http://voparis-confluence.obspm.fr/display/VES/Observatory+Facility+Database

span dates needed...

WISeREP (Weizmann Interactive Supernova data REPository) - Yaron et Gal-Yam ( 2012PASP..124..668Y):

http://wiserep.weizmann.ac.il

Database for supernovae providing (among other things) a list of 110 telescopes with latitude/longitude, elevation, diameter, URL and location.

Seems to be updated by the community.

For observatories:

ESO Telescope Bibliography (TelBib) - (Head librarian: Uta Grothkopf):

http://telbib.eso.org

Tracking publications that use data from ESO’s telescopes and instruments.

List of NOAO (National Optical Astronomy Observatory) facilities for 2017A :

https://www.noao.edu/noaoprop/help/facilities.html#list

The MPC observatories list ("official" observatory codes):

http://www.cfa.harvard.edu/iau/lists/ObsCodes.html, on the VO as ivo://org.gavo.dc/obscode/q/query

For publications:

American Astronomical Society (AAS) journal (chief scientific editor: Greg Schwarz):

"The AAS created a set of facility keywords about 12 years ago to help librarians and agencies track which facilities where used. The list has grown in that time and now contains almost 500 facilities. You can view them via this interface:

http://journals.aas.org/authors/aastex/facility.html

It does get used by a few authors (~10-20%) but it is not mandatory. It also only applies to the AAS Journals so its adoption is not widespread. Another issues that might be important to you is that we do not have a vocabulary for instruments as we thought that would be too hard to track and monitor. The facility keyword is controlled but we let the author put in whatever they want for the instrument.

Plans for the future are 1) to have the Unified Astronomy Thesaurus (UAT) folks integrate the list into the Thesaurus and 2) a pilot program to semantically identify facilities in AAS articles during production and then have the author approve/change the results during proofs. We are hopeful that this last option will greatly increase the tagging of facilities in our journals."

Others

JKT's list of available optical/infrared telescopes to UK astronomers (personal page of John Taylor?):

http://www.astro.keele.ac.uk/jkt/telescopes.html

This is a list and basic details of the ground-based optical and infrared observing facilities which accept applications for telescope time from UK astronomers.

According to type of telescopes and spectral domains:

On Wikipedia : lists of optical telescopes, solar telescopes, radio telescopes, large optical telescopes, space telescopes, largest optical telescopes in the continental United States, infrared telescopes, refracting telescopes, largest optical refracting telescopes, largest infrared telescopes, astronomical observatories, X-ray space telescopes, proposed space observatories...

MAST (The Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes): More than a list. Implies log archive...

http://archive.stsci.edu/

MAST is a NASA funded project to support and provide to the astronomical community a variety of astronomical data archives, with the primary focus on scientifically related data sets in the optical, ultraviolet, and near-infrared parts of the spectrum.) List of missions.

Use-cases

CDS usages for SIMBAD - (documentalist: Mihaela Buga):

Internal list on a TWiki with 75 telescopes/missions: http://cds.u-strasbg.fr/twiki/bin/view/Ressources/CoordLambdaQualite1#ListMis

The purpose is to have the wavelength and quality of astrometry for SIMBAD according to the diverse instruments.

We have telescopes, instruments, wavelength domains, URLs toward the telescope site and Wikipedia and notes from astronomers concerning the quality of astrometry.

CDS usages for VizieR - (documentalist: Emmanuelle Perret, Sylvain, Patricia et Marianne):

1. Description of measurements from tables in publications implies a section "Description" in a ReadMe file describing the observations: telescope/instrument and its location, date of observations are mandatory. If possible, wavelength range and resolution are also given (useful for SIMBAD).

2. Photometry from tables is used for the service called "Photometry viewer", it converts magnitudes in fluxes when possible and gather all the fluxes around a position to trace the spectral energy distribution (SED) of an object (if the search around the position only gives one object)...

In order to do so, we attribute filters to the measurements which are gathered in an internal table:

http://vizier.u-strasbg.fr/viz-bin/VizieR-2?-source=METAfilter

System of photometry is important and in that case, we go up to the precise filter with effective wavelength and width of the filter.

All the filters from the SVO (http://svo2.cab.inta-csic.es/theory/fps/) have been included in this table.

3. Associated data (Gilles Landais) - aide à l'indexation : extraction des header FITS (TEL_ID, DATE... ?) - list of telescopes increasing with indexations.

Purpose: database (http://cdsarc.u-strasbg.fr/assocdata/) searchable by observation date, spectral bands, coordinates in time series, spectra, images associated to publications.

CDS usages for the Dictionary of Nomenclature - (documentalist: Marianne & Fabienne):

When the publication is linked to specific observations, the facility is described along with the acronym created for the paper.

For instance, see section Note for http://cds.u-strasbg.fr/cgi-bin/Dic-Simbad?/3104709

CDS usages for the HiPS in Aladin - (documentalist: Mihaela):

In properties (See properties) of HiPS, "obs_description" contain the telescope name and can contain the instrument in some cases.

Cf. Propriétés de l'ensemble des HiPS: http://alasky.unistra.fr/MocServer/query?hips_service_url=*&dataproduct_type=!catalog&dataproduct_type=!cube&get=record

Keywords assessment for bibliographic citation