Online astronomy database gets a refresh

Much like Google, the home page of the NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS) hasn’t changed much since its debut in the 1990s. Unfortunately, neither has the software running the astronomy literature database’s search engine.

Now, a quarter century after its launch, the searchable catalog of nearly every piece of astronomy-related literature has been completely revamped. Unlike its antiquated predecessor , the new ADS platform, known as Bumblebee , processes the full text of papers, displays figures, and provides citation tracking, among other features. Currently offered as a beta version, Bumblebee is expected to become the default ADS platform within a few months.

Funded by NASA’s astrophysics division since the early 1990s, ADS was actually a trailblazer in the sharing of scientific knowledge over the internet. When ADS linked electronically with the French-based SIMBAD catalog in 1993, it was the first time an internet connection could be used for real-time querying of databases separated by an ocean. The following year ADS moved to the nascent World Wide Web.

Today ADS contains more than 13 million records of peer-reviewed papers, arXiv preprints, conference proceedings, software packages, and more. The roughly 50 000 daily visitors can search for an author, a title, or a keyword such as the name of a mission or an astronomical object. But all of that added functionality had to be jury-rigged into outdated software, which over the years has become painfully obvious. “From a usability perspective, it’s gotten worse and worse,” says ADS principal investigator Alberto Accomazzi. “More and more fields and check boxes were added to an initially simple search.”

So in 2010 the ADS team began exploring options for an upgrade, and five years later it began working on Bumblebee. Supported by annual NASA grants of about $2.8 million plus an upgrade-specific award in 2016, developers customized an open-source search technology and added a new user interface.

Aside from the fresh look, Bumblebee offers the major advantage of full text search; the classic ADS search only combs through abstracts. The new platform also features result filtering and improved citation tracking. “You can now retrieve your publications and all the papers that cite your publications,” Accomazzi says. “Then you can sort those papers in various ways.” He expects those changes to aid individual researchers as well as funding agencies that want to evaluate the impact of a specific mission, theory, or astronomical object.

For now, users have access to both Bumblebee and the classic ADS platform. Before removing the beta label from Bumblebee, Accomazzi’s team wants to ensure that it has every feature of its predecessor and that it will run just as quickly, despite the increased computing resources required for each user.

The ADS refresh comes as another popular but ancient-looking science publishing site, the 27-year-old arXiv, prepares for a major revamp of its own. Erick Peirson, who is spearheading arXiv’s next-generation platform, recently joined the ADS advisory users group and compared notes with the ADS team. “I think we found that we could learn from each other,” Accomazzi says.