arXiv subjects

Alberto Accomazzi

Publications and source records attributed to Alberto Accomazzi.

At least 55 records · Page 3Linked to original sources

arXiv2014

The Unified Astronomy Thesaurus

The Unified Astronomy Thesaurus (UAT) is an open, interoperable and community-supported thesaurus which unifies the existing divergent and isolated Astronomy & Astrophysics vocabularies into a single high-quality, freely-available open thesaurus formalizing astronomical concepts and their inter-relationships. The UAT builds upon the existing IAU Thesaurus with major contributions from the astronomy portions of the thesauri developed by the Institute of Physics Publishing, the American Institute of Physics, and SPIE. We describe the effort behind the creation of the UAT and the process through which we plan to maintain the document updated through broad community participation.

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arXiv2012

Astronomy and Computing: a New Journal for the Astronomical Computing Community

We introduce \emph{Astronomy and Computing}, a new journal for the growing population of people working in the domain where astronomy overlaps with computer science and information technology. The journal aims to provide a new communication channel within that community, which is not well served by current journals, and to help secure recognition of its true importance within modern astronomy. In this inaugural editorial, we describe the rationale for creating the journal, outline its scope and ambitions, and seek input from the community in defining in detail how the journal should work towards its high-level goals.

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arXiv2012

Telescope Bibliographies: an Essential Component of Archival Data Management and Operations

Assessing the impact of astronomical facilities rests upon an evaluation of the scientific discoveries which their data have enabled. Telescope bibliographies, which link data products with the literature, provide a way to use bibliometrics as an impact measure for the underlying data. In this paper we argue that the creation and maintenance of telescope bibliographies should be considered an integral part of an observatory's operations. We review the existing tools, services, and workflows which support these curation activities, giving an estimate of the effort and expertise required to maintain an archive-based telescope bibliography.

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arXiv2011

Why don't we already have an Integrated Framework for the Publication and Preservation of all Data Products?

Astronomy has long had a working network of archives supporting the curation of publications and data. The discipline has already created many of the features which perplex other areas of science: (1) data repositories: (supra)national institutes, dedicated to large projects; a culture of user-contributed data; practical experience of long-term data preservation; (2) dataset identifiers: the community has already piloted experiments, knows what can undermine these efforts, and is participating in the development of next-generation standards; (3) citation of datasets in papers: the community has an innovative and expanding infrastructure for the curation of data and bibliographic resources, and through them a community of author s and editors familiar with such electronic publication efforts; as well, it has experimented with next-generation web standards (e.g. the Semantic Web); (4) publisher buy-in: publishers in this area have been willing to innovate within the constraints of their commercial imperatives. What can possibly be missing? Why don't we have an integrated framework for the publication and preservation of all data products already? Are there technical barriers? We don't believe so. Are there cultural or commercial forces inhibiting this? We aren't aware of any. This Birds of a Feather session (BoF) attempted to identify existing barriers to the creation of such a framework, and attempted to identify the parties or groups which can contribute to the creation of a VO-powered data-publishing framework.

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arXiv2011

Linking to Data - Effect on Citation Rates in Astronomy

Is there a difference in citation rates between articles that were published with links to data and articles that were not? Besides being interesting from a purely academic point of view, this question is also highly relevant for the process of furthering science. Data sharing not only helps the process of verification of claims, but also the discovery of new findings in archival data. However, linking to data still is a far cry away from being a "practice", especially where it comes to authors providing these links during the writing and submission process. You need to have both a willingness and a publication mechanism in order to create such a practice. Showing that articles with links to data get higher citation rates might increase the willingness of scientists to take the extra steps of linking data sources to their publications. In this presentation we will show this is indeed the case: articles with links to data result in higher citation rates than articles without such links. The ADS is funded by NASA Grant NNX09AB39G.

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arXiv2011

The ADS in the Information Age - Impact on Discovery

The SAO/NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS) grew up with and has been riding the waves of the Information Age, closely monitoring and anticipating the needs of its end-users. By now, all professional astronomers are using the ADS on a daily basis, and a substantial fraction have been using it for their entire professional career. In addition to being an indispensable tool for professional scientists, the ADS also moved into the public domain, as a tool for science education. In this paper we will highlight and discuss some aspects indicative of the impact the ADS has had on research and the access to scholarly publications. The ADS is funded by NASA Grant NNX09AB39G

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arXiv2011

Semantic Interlinking of Resources in the Virtual Observatory Era

In the coming era of data-intensive science, it will be increasingly important to be able to seamlessly move between scientific results, the data analyzed in them, and the processes used to produce them. As observations, derived data products, publications, and object metadata are curated by different projects and archived in different locations, establishing the proper linkages between these resources and describing their relationships becomes an essential activity in their curation and preservation. In this paper we describe initial efforts to create a semantic knowledge base allowing easier integration and linking of the body of heterogeneous astronomical resources which we call the Virtual Observatory (VO). The ultimate goal of this effort is the creation of a semantic layer over existing resources, allowing applications to cross boundaries between archives. The proposed approach follows the current best practices in Semantic Computing and the architecture of the web, allowing the use of off-the-shelf technologies and providing a path for VO resources to become part of the global web of linked data.

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arXiv2011

Linking Literature and Data: Status Report and Future Efforts

In the current era of data-intensive science, it is increasingly important for researchers to be able to have access to published results, the supporting data, and the processes used to produce them. Six years ago, recognizing this need, the American Astronomical Society and the Astrophysics Data Centers Executive Committee (ADEC) sponsored an effort to facilitate the annotation and linking of datasets during the publishing process, with limited success. I will review the status of this effort and describe a new, more general one now being considered in the context of the Virtual Astronomical Observatory.

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arXiv2010

Astronomy 3.0 Style

Over the next decade we will witness the development of a new infrastructure in support of data-intensive scientific research, which includes Astronomy. This new networked environment will offer both challenges and opportunities to our community and has the potential to transform the way data are described, curated and preserved. Based on the lessons learned during the development and management of the ADS, a case is made for adopting the emerging technologies and practices of the Semantic Web to support the way Astronomy research will be conducted. Examples of how small, incremental steps can, in the aggregate, make a significant difference in the provision and repurposing of astronomical data are provided.

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arXiv2010

Finding Your Literature Match -- A Recommender System

The universe of potentially interesting, searchable literature is expanding continuously. Besides the normal expansion, there is an additional influx of literature because of interdisciplinary boundaries becoming more and more diffuse. Hence, the need for accurate, efficient and intelligent search tools is bigger than ever. Even with a sophisticated search engine, looking for information can still result in overwhelming results. An overload of information has the intrinsic danger of scaring visitors away, and any organization, for-profit or not-for-profit, in the business of providing scholarly information wants to capture and keep the attention of its target audience. Publishers and search engine engineers alike will benefit from a service that is able to provide visitors with recommendations that closely meet their interests. Providing visitors with special deals, new options and highlights may be interesting to a certain degree, but what makes more sense (especially from a commercial point of view) than to let visitors do most of the work by the mere action of making choices? Hiring psychics is not an option, so a technological solution is needed to recommend items that a visitor is likely to be looking for. In this presentation we will introduce such a solution and argue that it is practically feasible to incorporate this approach into a useful addition to any information retrieval system with enough usage.

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arXiv2010

Towards a Resource-Centric Data Network for Astronomy

Over the past decade, astronomers have been using an increasingly larger number of web-based applications and archives to conduct their research. However, despite the early success in creating links across projects and data centers, the promise of a single integrated digital library environment supporting e-science in astronomy has proven elusive. While some of the issues hampering progress in this area are of technical nature, others are rooted in existing policies which should be re-analyzed if further rapid progress is to be made in this area. This paper describes a proposal that the NASA Astrophysics Data System project has put forth in order to improve its role as one of the primary discovery portals for astronomers, focusing on those aspects which could benefit from an increased level of involvement from the community, namely the effort to expose astronomy resources as linked data, and the harvesting of observational metadata.

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arXiv2009

Using Multipartite Graphs for Recommendation and Discovery

The Smithsonian/NASA Astrophysics Data System exists at the nexus of a dense system of interacting and interlinked information networks. The syntactic and the semantic content of this multipartite graph structure can be combined to provide very specific research recommendations to the scientist/user.

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arXiv2009

Worldwide Use and Impact of the NASA Astrophysics Data System Digital Library

By combining data from the text, citation, and reference databases with data from the ADS readership logs we have been able to create Second Order Bibliometric Operators, a customizable class of collaborative filters which permits substantially improved accuracy in literature queries. Using the ADS usage logs along with membership statistics from the International Astronomical Union and data on the population and gross domestic product (GDP) we develop an accurate model for world-wide basic research where the number of scientists in a country is proportional to the GDP of that country, and the amount of basic research done by a country is proportional to the number of scientists in that country times that country's per capita GDP. We introduce the concept of utility time to measure the impact of the ADS/URANIA and the electronic astronomical library on astronomical research. We find that in 2002 it amounted to the equivalent of 736 FTE researchers, or $250 Million, or the astronomical research done in France. Subject headings: digital libraries; bibliometrics; sociology of science; information retrieval

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arXiv2009

The Bibliometric Properties of Article Readership Information

The NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS), along with astronomy's journals and data centers (a collaboration dubbed URANIA), has developed a distributed on-line digital library which has become the dominant means by which astronomers search, access and read their technical literature. Digital libraries such as the NASA Astrophysics Data System permit the easy accumulation of a new type of bibliometric measure, the number of electronic accesses (``reads'') of individual articles. We explore various aspects of this new measure. We examine the obsolescence function as measured by actual reads, and show that it can be well fit by the sum of four exponentials with very different time constants. We compare the obsolescence function as measured by readership with the obsolescence function as measured by citations. We find that the citation function is proportional to the sum of two of the components of the readership function. This proves that the normative theory of citation is true in the mean. We further examine in detail the similarities and differences between the citation rate, the readership rate and the total citations for individual articles, and discuss some of the causes. Using the number of reads as a bibliometric measure for individuals, we introduce the read-cite diagram to provide a two-dimensional view of an individual's scientific productivity. We develop a simple model to account for an individual's reads and cites and use it to show that the position of a person in the read-cite diagram is a function of age, innate productivity, and work history. We show the age biases of both reads and cites, and develop two new bibliometric measures which have substantially less age bias than citations

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arXiv2009

The Smithsonian/NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS) Decennial Report

Eight years after the ADS first appeared the last decadal survey wrote: "NASA's initiative for the Astrophysics Data System has vastly increased the accessibility of the scientific literature for astronomers. NASA deserves credit for this valuable initiative and is urged to continue it." Here we summarize some of the changes concerning the ADS which have occurred in the past ten years, and we describe the current status of the ADS. We then point out two areas where the ADS is building an improved capability which could benefit from a policy statement of support in the ASTRO2010 report. These are: The Semantic Interlinking of Astronomy Observations and Datasets and The Indexing of the Full Text of Astronomy Research Publications.

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arXiv2008

Use of Astronomical Literature - A Report on Usage Patterns

In this paper we present a number of metrics for usage of the SAO/NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS). Since the ADS is used by the entire astronomical community, these are indicative of how the astronomical literature is used. We will show how the use of the ADS has changed both quantitatively and qualitatively. We will also show that different types of users access the system in different ways. Finally, we show how use of the ADS has evolved over the years in various regions of the world. The ADS is funded by NASA Grant NNG06GG68G.

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arXiv2007

Finding Astronomical Communities Through Co-readership Analysis

Whenever a large group of people are engaged in an activity, communities will form. The nature of these communities depends on the relationship considered. In the group of people who regularly use scholarly literature, a relationship like ``person i and person j have cited the same paper'' might reveal communities of people working in a particular field. On this poster, we will investigate the relationship ``person i and person j have read the same paper''. Using the data logs of the NASA/Smithsonian Astrophysics Data System (ADS), we first determine the population that will participate by requiring that a user queries the ADS at a certain rate. Next, we apply the relationship to this population. The result of this will be an abstract ``relationship space'', which we will describe in terms of various ``representations''. Examples of such ``representations'' are the projection of co-read vectors onto Principal Components and the spectral density of the co-read network. We will show that the co-read relationship results in structure, we will describe this structure and we will provide a first attempt in the classification of this structure in terms of astronomical communities. The ADS is funded by NASA Grant NNG06GG68G.

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arXiv2006

Closing the loop: Linking Datasets to Publications and Back

With the mainstream adoption of references to datasets in astronomical manuscripts, researchers today are able to provide direct links from their papers to the original data that were used in their study. Following a process similar to the verification of references in manuscripts, publishers have been working with the NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS) to validate and maintain links to these datasets. Similarly, many astronomical data centers have been tracking publications based on the observations that they archive, and have been working with the ADS to maintain links between their datasets and the bibliographic records in question. In addition to providing a valuable service to ADS users, maintaining these correlations allows the data centers to evaluate the scientific impact of their missions. Until recently, these two activities have evolved in parallel on independent tracks, with ADS playing a central role in bridging the connection between publishers and data centers. However, the ADS is now implementing the capability for all parties involved to find out which data links have been published with which manuscripts, and vice versa. This will allow data centers to periodically harvest the ADS to find out if there are new papers which reference datasets available in their archives. In this paper we summarize the state of the dataset linking project and describe the new harvesting interface.

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