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M. Schmitz, O. Pevunova, J. Mazzarella, J. Good, B. Berriman, B. Madore (Caltech), NED Team
The NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database (NED) provides data and cross-identifications for over 8 million objects fused from thousands of survey catalogs and journal articles. The data cover all frequencies from radio through gamma rays and include positions, redshifts, photometry and spectral energy distributions (SEDs), sizes, and images. NED services have traditionally supplied data in HTML format for connections from Web browsers, and a custom ASCII data structure for connections by remote computer programs written in C. We demonstrate new services that provide responses from NED queries in XML documents compliant with the international virtual observatory VOTable protocol, as well as simple tab-separated or comma-separated values (CSV). The NED services that support the new tabular output include By Name, Near Name and Near Position (cone searches), All-Sky searches based on object parameters (survey names, cross-IDs, redshifts, flux densities), and queries for images, photometry/SEDs, redshifts, positions, and diameters. The VOTable services have been integrated into the NVO registry, and they are also available directly from NED's Web interface (http://nedwww.ipac.caltech.edu). This development greatly simplifies the integration of data from NED into visualization and analysis packages, scripts, and other applications. We illustrate an example of importing a NED SED into Excel, as well as plotting and comparing SEDs using the VOPlot Java applet.
NED is operated by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The XML/VOTable portion of this work was funded by the US National Virtual Observatory, which is sponsored by the National Science Foundation. We also acknowledge assistance from the NVO Technical Working Group.
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Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, 37 #4
© 2005. The American Astronomical Soceity.