Using Data Tags in Journals
What Are Data Tags?
Data tags aim to provide close linkage between published papers and data sets archived at NASA's data centers and archives. Authors may include data tags returned by IRSA and other data providers in their papers through the AASTeX 5.2 "\dataset" macro. Tags appearing in the electronic edition of the Astrophysical Journal are linked to a name resolver at ADS and enable readers to locate and access the data themselves. IRSA users are able to recover the data by using the tag as input to a simple web form. The American Astronomical Society cites the following benefits of data tagging: immediate access to the data used in the paper; support for seamless transition between the electronic journals and the data providers; higher visibility of papers to researchers. To learn more, visit the AAS data linking site.
Structure of IRSA Data Tags
IRSA data tags encode the query that generates the data rather than the data sets themselves. This choice reflects that IRSA services generally return filtered data sets (such as subsets of source catalogs) and dynamically created products (such as image cutouts). The "Data Tag" has the form:- "ADS" indicates that the Astrophysics Data System (ADS) is the "registering authority" for ADEC identifiers,
- "facility" is a name registered with the ADS in the form:"observatory.telescope". The facility designator for IRSA is "IRSA.Service" where Service is the data access service used by the query (e.g. "Atlas").
- "identifier" is for IRSA a string representing the date and time of the query to the Service. The format of this string is [year]/[month][day]/[start time]_[process ID]) (e.g., 2006/0629/085200_3986), IRSA will be expanding the facilities available for ADS publication.
Examples of valid Data Tags are:
- ADS/IRSA.Atlas#2006/0630/091305_331 [COSMOS data (Cosmic Evolution Survey with HST)]
- ADS/IRSA.Atlas#2006/0630/014646_28527 [LGA data (2MASS Large Galaxy Altas)]
- ADS/IRSA.Atlas#2006/0629/233150_10488 [NED images (NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database)]
- ADS/IRSA.Cutouts#2008/0717/135656_12315 [ISSA image cutouts (IRAS Sky Survey Atlas)]
- ADS/IRSA.Gator#2008/0717/142005_17844 [COSMOS (Cosmic Evolution Survey) source search of the Photometry Catalog]
Services to Users
To retrieve data using an IRSA data tag, visit IRSA's Data Tag Service.Using the above naming conventions, the ADS search service can search not only IRSA but all of the NASA data centers. ADS also hosts a dataset verification service.
Also available is a complete list of ADS registered facilities.