Safeguarding Old and New Journal Tables for the VO: Status for Extragalactic and Radio Data

TL;DR

This paper discusses the challenges in collecting, preserving, and integrating radio and extragalactic object data from scientific articles, emphasizing the need for improved collaboration and data recovery efforts within the Virtual Observatory framework.

Contribution

It highlights the extent of unarchived data from over 2600 articles and advocates for enhanced collaboration and resource allocation to improve data coverage in astronomical databases.

Findings

Only 41% of articles have tables in major catalogs.

OCR recovered data from 740 papers.

Current databases lack significant published data.

Abstract

Independent of established data centers, and partly for my own research, since 1989 I have been collecting the tabular data from over 2600 articles concerned with radio sources and extragalactic objects in general. Optical character recognition (OCR) was used to recover tables from 740 papers. Tables from only 41 percent of the 2600 articles are available in the CDS or CATS catalog collections, and only slightly better coverage is estimated for the NED database. This fraction is not better for articles published electronically since 2001. Both object databases (NED, SIMBAD, LEDA) as well as catalog browsers (VizieR, CATS) need to be consulted to obtain the most complete information on astronomical objects. More human resources at the data centers and better collaboration between authors, referees, editors, publishers, and data centers are required to improve data coverage and accessibility. The current efforts within the Virtual Observatory (VO) project, to provide retrieval and analysis tools for different types of published and archival data stored at various sites, should be balanced by an equal effort to recover and include large amounts of published data not currently available in this way.