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Session 38 - Electronic Journals and Other AAS Web Services.
Display session, Tuesday, January 16
North Banquet Hall, Convention Center
The Web Interface for Searching Archival Research Data (WISARD) has been developed to assist researchers with multi-wavelength, multi-mission archives access. WISARD has been designed to allow users to search one or more catalogs simultaneously and then, when available, request the data from the NASA Data Archive and Distribution Service (NDADS) and other archives via the World Wide Web (WWW). A combination of shell scripts, C, and Interactive Data Language (IDL) have been used in the creation of WISARD. Since WISARD retains a session context between one page and another, users are able to modify search criteria and revisit their earlier pages. There are a set of general search criteria that all the catalogs have in common. Additional criteria specific to any given catalog are also available and may be added to the overall criteria for the search. WISARD uses SIMBAD to resolve object names into coordinates and then uses those coordinates for the subsequent search. The integration of additional catalogs is greatly simplified by the use of a master table to supply information that will be needed for each of the different catalogs. In addition to finding entries in catalogs that match the search criteria, WISARD also may perform intersections between the the selected catalogs. The WISARD URL is http://hypatia.gsfc.nasa.gov/wisard/wisard.html. The International Ultraviolet Explorer (IUE) WWW Search Service, jointly developed by the Astrophysics Data Facility (ADF) and IUE Project, was used as a prototype for WISARD. SIMBAD access is provided in collaboration with the SIMBAD project, Centre de Donnees astronomiques de Strasbourg (CDS), France.
