Shared nomenclature and identifiers for telescopes and instruments

Abstract

In the context of sharing public data, science results are expected to be reproducible and therefore we need full traceability of the origin of the data. On the documentalist side, there is a need to relate instrumental origins to the published data. We propose to define a shared nomenclature to index each publication with unique designations for facilities, telescopes and instruments which could benefit from the Virtual Observatory work on semantics. This would help the documentalists to check the consistency of the instrument description in publications or make it more explicit. Observation period, data quality and spectral coverage, for instance, may be checked by referencing a global instrumentation service which gathers the nominal observation parameters for the telescope/facility/instrument involved. Based on this indexation mechanism, then the bibliographic metrics for telescope /instrument usage would be easy to compute, and tracking services like the ESO telescope bibliography database (TelBib) or others would be easier to feed. This paper traces the existing initiatives and gives the example of a facility description framework reusing Virtual Observatory metadata which could be fed by the community.