New NED XML/VOtable Services and Client Interface Applications

Abstract

The NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database (NED) provides data and crossidenti fications for over 7 million extragalactic 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 the C programming language. We describe new services that provide responses from NED queries in XML documents compliant with the international virtual observatory VOtable protocol. The XML/VOtable services support cone searches, all-sky searches based on object attributes (survey names, cross-IDs, redshifts, flux densities), and requests for detailed object data. Initial services have been inserted into the NVO registry, and others will follow soon. The first client application is a Style Sheet specification for rendering NED VOtable query results in Web browsers that support XML. The second prototype application is a Java applet that allows users to compare multiple SEDs. The new XML/VOtable output mode will also simplify the integration of data from NED into visualization and analysis packages, software agents, and other virtual observatory applications. We show an example SED from NED plotted using VOPlot. The NED website is: http://nedwww.ipac.caltech.edu.

Files

Additional details