Category: News

The Unified Astronomy Thesaurus Handbook provides a discussion of the value of a controlled vocabulary of astronomical keywords, a historical background on the Unified Astronomy Thesaurus (UAT), a description of the UAT and how to use and implement it, and a discussion of the benefits the UAT offers to the astronomy and astrophysics research community. The UAT Handbook is a live document that is continuously revised and updated as needed.

The Unified Astronomy Thesaurus (UAT) is an open and interoperable thesaurus that welcomes community support and input. Now in its eleventh year, 2024 was a momentous year for the UAT.

In March 2024 the Wolbach Library at the Center for Astrophysics was closed and its staff was laid off. This included the interim Head Librarian, Katie Frey, who was instrumental in the early and continuing development and curation of the UAT. The suddenness of the closing meant that the UAT Steering Committee had to scramble to find a new home for the UAT and a way to retain Katie’s 10+ years of institutional knowledge. Fortunately, the UAT is now hosted by the Astrophysics Data System (ADS) / Science Explorer (SciX) team, and Katie has agreed to continue supporting the UAT on a contract basis through the end of the year.

The sudden Wolbach closure was an impetus for a major restructuring of the UAT committee to provide more formal governance and support. The AAS Board of Trustees approved the formation of the Working Group on the Unified – Astronomy Thesaurus at the June 2024 Board meeting. Like the former Steering Committee, the Working Group directive is to manage, maintain, and improve the UAT. However, its elevation to a formal Working Group should bring more visibility within the AAS to its work.The listing of the members of the working group is available on the UAT website.

In January 2023, ADS had a pilot project to use machine learning techniques to assign UAT keywords to the scholarly literature. What began as a student project has grown into a professional development effort led by Felix Grezes, ADS Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing Specialist. The Working Group will be validating the output of his algorithm during the last quarter of this year. When implemented, the algorithm will generate a consistent set of keywords for all of the scholarly literature indexed by ADS for which ADS has abstracts. A consistent, structured keyword system across the disciplines of astronomy, planetary science, and heliophysics will improve the findability of research. Furthermore, the linking of formal concepts across keyword systems facilitates cross-disciplinary discovery as each scientist searches for information using the language of her or his discipline.

The latest version of the UAT, v5.1.0, was released on 20 June 2024. It has 2275 concepts, 11 top concepts, a depth of 11 levels, with 692 related concept links. We anticipate that the next version will be released in July 2025. This version will have expanded Heliophysics concepts, which will broaden the UAT reach beyond astronomy and astrophysics.

Finally, the UAT Working Group would like to thank Julie Steffen for her many years of service in the UAT governance and wish her well in her retirement. We are grateful that she prioritized establishing a firm foundation for the future of the UAT even as she prepared for the next phase of her own life. She was an energetic and capable Chief Publishing Officer for the AAS journals and saw the benefits that the UAT could provide across publishing houses.

Cross posted from the ADS Blog.

Alberto Accomazzi (ADS Principal Investigator), Jenny Novacescu (Space Telescope Science Institute), Katie Frey (Center for Astrophysics & UAT Curator), and Pavlos Protopapas (Harvard University)

The ADS Team is working in collaboration with Pavlos Protopapas and Ben Yuen of Harvard University to pilot the integration of the Unified Astronomy Thesaurus (UAT) into ADS search and discovery for new, future, and legacy literature. ADS users will be able to browse results using left side facets in the query results screen, or conduct an initial search using UAT terms.

While it is currently possible to search ADS by keywords provided by publishers, there is no single vocabulary that has been consistently used throughout the indexed literature in ADS. The Astronomical Subject Keywords that had been in use by leading astronomy journals since the 1970s hasn’t been updated since 2013, and may not cover the latest topics in the field. The ‘Keywords’ also do not include definitions or relationships between concepts. For this reason, the American Astronomical Society (AAS) journals and the Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific (PASP) elected to adopt the Unified Astronomy Thesaurus as its keyword system of choice in 2019 and 2020, respectively.  

The UAT is an open, interoperable, and community-supported project which formalizes astronomical concepts and their inter-relationships into a well-curated, freely available open resource. It reconciled divergent and isolated vocabularies from the fields of astronomy and astrophysics, such as the IAU Thesaurus, the Physics and Astronomy Classification Scheme, the Astronomy Subject Keywords, and others. The UAT’s primary mission is to support semantic enrichment of the literature, thereby enabling greater search and discovery across the astrophysics literature. In addition, the UAT is being used as a taxonomy with which to label other astronomical research products, such as software and datasets.

The ADS Team’s goal is to promote the use of UAT concepts as a standard way to describe and discover records in its astronomy collection. Ben Yuen, working under the supervision of Protopapas, is using machine learning techniques to automatically assign UAT terms to the majority of records in ADS which do not have them, such as the legacy literature. In order to produce accurate results, the system is being trained on the corpus of AAS articles which currently have UAT concepts associated with them. Validation of the results through editorial input and user feedback will be used to improve the automated process. 

This pilot program is beneficial to all of ADS, as it provides a single, up-to-date set of concepts that can be used to identify all current research topics of interest to astronomers. The team intends to extend the system to use concepts drawn from other controlled vocabularies for subject areas outside the core astronomy collection. (To learn more about ADS’ recent expansion, which encompasses Planetary Science and Heliophysics literature, and will in future include Earth Science, and Biological & Physical Sciences view our earlier blog post: https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/blog/arc-ssad-project). Development and testing of this prototype are ongoing. The ADS Team expects to release this capability in production by December 2023.

As ADS adopts use of the UAT across its astronomy collection, we encourage all astronomy and astrophysics publishers to use the thesaurus as its article keyword system to facilitate integration of this content into future ADS search and discovery. As more journals and research products – such as datasets, software, and proposals – are tagged with UAT terms, the ability to search, browse, and crosslink all of these resources by science topic will increase.

While the AAS has assumed formal ownership of the UAT, the thesaurus remains available under a Creative Commons License, ensuring its widest use while protecting the intellectual property of its contributors. Development and maintenance are stewarded by a broad group of parties with a direct stake in the UAT; this includes professional associations (IVOA, IAU), learned societies (AAS, RAS), publishers (IOP, AIP), software developers, librarians and other curators working for major astronomy institutes and data archives.

The UAT has been implemented by an increasing number of journals, research organizations, and systems. Current adoptees include:

• American Astronomical Society journals, including The Astronomical Journal (AJ), The Astrophysical Journal (ApJ), ApJS, ApJL, The Planetary Science Journal (PSJ), and Research Notes of the AAS (RNAAS)
• Astrophysics Data System (ADS)
• Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific (PASP)
• International Virtual Observatory Alliance (IVOA)
• Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) for the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) and James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) proposal systems
• WikiData
• Icarus – in formulation for 2023

The Unified Astronomy Thesaurus (UAT) is an open, interoperable, and community-supported project which formalizes astronomical concepts and their inter-relationships into a high-quality, freely available open resource. Its mission is to enable greater search and discovery across the astrophysics literature, as well as a taxonomy that can be used to label other research products, such as software and datasets. The UAT has been implemented by an increasing number of journals, research organizations, and systems*, including the American Astronomical Society and the JWST proposal system. It is currently being integrated into the Astrophysics Data System (ADS).

The Steering Committee (SC) sets the general parameters for the overall direction of the UAT and is composed of representatives from groups with a direct stake in the development and success of the UAT. Members of the SC also serve as representatives of the UAT, promoting it to global astronomy, astrophysics, library, and publishing communities, developing test cases, and increasing its overall use. More information about the Steering Committee is available on the UAT website. We welcome nominees from all regions of the world, with a specific interest in adding international and in particular Southern Hemisphere representation.

We welcome expressions of interest from astronomers, developers, data scientists, researchers, librarians, and others. The commitment is a two-year term (Feb 2023 – Feb 2025) and includes monthly SC meetings. New members can renew annually after their initial two-year term, up to a total of five years of membership. Please contact Jenny Novacescu, current chair of the UAT SC, with “UAT Steering Committee” in the subject line, to express your interest or to ask questions.

* Current adoptees include:

1. American Astronomical Society journals, including The Astronomical Journal (AJ), The Astrophysical Journal (ApJ), ApJS, ApJL, The Planetary Science Journal (PSJ), and Research Notes of the AAS (RNAAS)
2. Astrophysics Data System (ADS)
3. Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific (PASP)
4. International Virtual Observatory Alliance (IVOA)
5. Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) for the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) and JWST proposal systems
6. WikiData

The closing date is 20 January 2023.

(Cross posted from AAS News.)

This post is meant for users of the UAT Linked Data API hosted by ARDC. If you do not actively the API directly, no action is needed.

On November 5th the current domain name used by the Linked Data API (vocabs.ands.org.au) will cease to function and queries to the Linked Data API will need to use the new domain name (vocabs.ardc.edu.au) instead.

If you only use UAT URIs (e.g. https://astrothesaurus.org/uat/1234) then no change is needed.  We have updated the URI redirect to point to the new domain for the Linked Data API.

However, if you are making queries directly to the Linked Data API you will need to change to the new domain name in your scripts.

For example, if you are searching for a concept that has “photometry” in any label, you might use an API call like this:
https://vocabs.ands.org.au/repository/api/lda/aas/the-unified-astronomy-thesaurus/current/concept?anylabel=Photometry

By November 5th, the domain name in the API call needs to be updated like this:
https://vocabs.ardc.edu.au/repository/api/lda/aas/the-unified-astronomy-thesaurus/current/concept?anylabel=Photometry

Please reach out to the UAT Steering Committee if you have any questions.

This was originally posted on AAS Nova, written by Susanna Kohler , 12 February 2021.

Remember the Unified Astronomy Thesaurus? The UAT is an open, interoperable, and community-supported project that formalizes astronomical concepts and their inter-relationships into a high quality, freely available open resource. This resource can then be used to tag astronomical work — like articles, proposals, and datasets — with accurate, broadly adopted concepts.

The UAT has taken off in the year since we last reported on it! AAS journals have all moved entirely to using the more flexible and dynamic UAT in place the old, static keyword system. In addition, adoption is increasing across the broader astronomical community: the UAT has been implemented by the AAS journals, the Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, the International Virtual Observatory Alliance, the proposal system for the Hubble Space Telescope, and WikiData.

This week brings two news items from the UAT:

1. An opportunity to join the UAT Steering Committee
2. An update on the newest release of the UAT.

A Quick Refresher

Why is the UAT so cool? Simply put, organizing information is hard — but the UAT has provided a much-needed modern update for astronomy. Old systems of static keywords fail to capture the multidimensional nature of how concepts can relate to each other. When using the UAT to select keywords for their work, now, authors have access to a much broader range of suggestions that allow them to more accurately reflect what their work is about. 

An example: suppose I’m writing an article on spiral galaxies. If I enter this concept into the UAT, the Thesaurus knows that spiral galaxies fall under the parent concept of disk galaxies, and it also knows that Andromeda is a specific example of a spiral galaxy. What’s more, it’s aware that spiral galaxies are also referred to as S galaxies, and that the topic might come up in the related concept of the Hubble galaxy classification scheme.

The relationships charted within the UAT make it much easier for me to select the concepts that best describe the article I’m writing, the UAT’s living and adaptable nature allows it to keep up with changing times, and universal adoption of the UAT will greatly simplify the organization of information across platforms.

Become a UAT Steering Committee Member!

Are you convinced that this is a cool concept? Want to help shape the future development of the UAT? The UAT Steering Committee is seeking a new member.

The Steering Committee (SC) sets the general parameters for the overall direction of the UAT and is composed of representatives from groups with a direct stake in the development and success of the Thesaurus. Members of the SC also serve as representatives of the UAT, promoting it to global astronomy and astrophysics, library, and publishing communities; developing test cases; and increasing its overall use.

The UAT currently welcomes expressions of interest in the open SC position from astronomers, researchers, librarians, and others. The commitment is a two-year term and includes monthly SC meetings. You can contact the chair of the UAT SC, Barbara Kern, with “UAT Steering Committee” in the subject line to express your interest or to ask any questions. [Note: This year’s call for interest closed February 2021 –Katie Frey]

What’s New in the Latest UAT Update

In December 2020, Version 4.0.0 of the UAT was released to the worldwide astronomical community.

UAT v.4.0.0 added nearly 50 new concepts in the areas of planetary science and exoplanets and also added definitions — largely sourced from the Etymological Dictionary of Astronomy and Astrophysics — for about 40% of all existing concepts for the first time. For examples of concept definitions, see the image above for the spiral galaxies concept or view the file for baryonic dark matter. More accompanying definitions are expected in future releases.

A number of technical updates were also implemented in v.4.0.0. Deprecated concepts can now be found in the UAT GitHub repository, and there are multiple json files to choose from if implementing the Unified Astronomy Thesaurus in your local systems. For comprehensive v.4.0.0 release notes, visit https://astrothesaurus.org/blog/.

Where to Learn More

• UAT website
• AAS Nova introduction to UAT
• Powered by the Unified Astronomy Thesaurus videos
  This Youtube playlist contains brief videos that include tutorials for UAT use, discussions of its features, an introduction to how authors can influence the UAT, a look at how the UAT has been used in publications so far, and more.
• UAT Sorting Tool
  Want to help the UAT get its concepts right? This fun visualization tool makes contributing a breeze.