The SIMBAD astronomical database hosted by the CDS provides basic data, cross-identifications, bibliography and measurements for astronomical objects outside the solar system.
The CDS receives the bibliographic meta-data of the articles published in the main astronomical journals directly from the publishers. How we receive the data and their format vary from one publisher to the next. These data are first extracted and stored in files with a standardised format. Then, to avoid errors or misprints, we perform different tests on these data:
- Author names are compared to a reference list maintained at CDS, and the keywords are compared with the AAS list
- Astronomical objects are verified by checking their name in the SIMBAD database
- A completion test checks that all of articles of a journal volume are present
The next step identifies whether an astronomical object appears inside a title, a keyword or an abstract, and if so, we add a link to the object in SIMBAD. Once all of the verifications and corrections have been made we add the meta-data into SIMBAD. We also add other information such as the number of different astronomical objects studied in the paper, the presence tables and their links to VizieR, any new acronyms, as well as some comments. New developments are in progress to automatically extract the data from the tables in the articles (that have not been processed by, or provided to VizieR) . In addition, each night automatic checks are executed to list the new data and to test the coherence of these data in SIMBAD.
Astronomical Object Index