(O8.2) NED for a New Era
Joseph Mazzarella (California Institute Of Technology)
The NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database (NED,
http://nedwww.ipac.caltech.edu/) is a thematic, online
research facility designed to support scientists, educators,
space missions and observatories in planning, data analysis,
discovery, and publication of research on extragalactic
objects. NED‘s ongoing mission is to provide a comprehensive
and easy-to-use, multi-wavelength fusion of fundamental data for
all known (cataloged and published) objects beyond the Milky Way.
The contents and services span the entire spectrum from gamma
rays through radio frequencies, and they are continuously updated
to reflect the current literature and releases of large-scale sky
survey catalogs. After a brief retrospective of NED‘s first 15
years in operation, I will review recent and ongoing developments
that are vastly extending the content and capabilities of NED for
our modern era of research involving very large, multi-dimensional,
multi-wavelength data sets in the context of an interoperable
global Virtual Observatory. I will illustrate how researchers can
automate various types of queries to NED and retrieve machine-
readable tabular output using modern programming/scripting languages,
and review how developers around the world are integrating content
from NED Web services into various applications. I will close with a
discussion of the ongoing challenges for managing increasingly large
and diverse data sets while maintaining quality in NED operations,
which are centered around the core activity of establishing
cross-identifications and relating information from thousands of
journal articles and catalogs containing observations of hundreds of
millions of extragalactic objects and candidates.