The AstroDAbis service is for tagging, or annotating, astronomical objects.
By astronomical objects
we mean any object which has a reference in an
astronomical catalogue. The key thing is that you don't have to write to a
catalogue in order to make an annotation on the object. The service knows about
a broad range of catalogues, and more are being added.
For more details, see the help pages, or see our ADASS paper (arXiv:1111.6116).
The AstroDAbis service is currently a beta service. Please contact us if you have any questions or problems.
The resulting annotations can be retrieved through a TAP interface, which
means they can (using the magic of OGSA-DAI) be used as part of a multi-service
query: find me the luminosities of all objects in the SDSS which someone has
tagges as
quasar
.
There are two types of tag you can add:
this is aquasar
object A is aneighbourof object B
There are no restrictions on the tags you use – the model is the
tag-cloud
or folksonomy
of services like
delicious,
pinboard
or flickr. Having said that, the
two object
annotation has no analogue in those services, plus we anticipate
adding some richer annotation terms in future.
You create tags by uploading a VOTable containing catalogue IDs, and then using the service interface to indicate the catalogue and table they refer to.