Christina W. Heikkila (NASA GSFC/RSTX), Thomas A. McGlynn (NASA GSFC/USRA), Nicholas E. White (NASA GSFC)
Reference URL: http://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/astrobrowse/
Astrobrowse is a user agent which significantly streamlines the process of gathering astronomical data on the web. With it, a user can query thousands of resources without having to search through old bookmark lists, deal with out-of-date URLs, or spend time figuring out how to use each resource's unique input form. Given a user's selection of web-based astronomical databases and a target name or coordinates, Astrobrowse will explode queries to all selected databases and collect the results. Since the introduction of the prototype at ADASS VII (McGlynn and White, ADASS VII), many changes have been made to the service, from redesigning the front-end user interface, to the adoption of GLU (Fernique et al, ADASS VII) as the mechanism for keeping the resource URLs current.
Including HEASARC, there are five sites offering Astrobrowse-affiliated services. STScI and CDS run their own software serving the Astrobrowse resources, and HEASARC's software has been successfully ported to SAO and LEDAS. This software is freely available to anyone wishing to become an Astrobrowse node.
Currently seven data providers are participating in the Astrobrowse GLU network, which automatically updates all participants' copies of the shared dictionary of URLs when one participant alters their contribution. These data providers are continuously adding new resources to the shared GLU dictionary. We encourage other data providers to serve GLU records to the Astrobrowse system.
Future work planned for the Astrobrowse project includes interaction with other HEASARC web services, such as SkyView and W3Browse.