Objective

To create a Unified Astronomy Thesaurus as an open, interoperable, and community supported thesaurus. The UAT will bring together existing Astronomy and Astrophysics vocabularies into a single, freely-available, online thesaurus, available to publishers, authors, and everyone else with an interest in classifying astronomical content.

Methods

Because astronomy and astrophysics are fast-moving fields, terms that are common today, such as ‘exoplanets’ and ‘dark energy’, were relatively unknown 10 years ago. In order to keep up with the ever-changing field of astronomy, the UAT will solicit suggestions and recommendations from the astronomy community at large. A librarian will be in place to direct suggestions to an appropriate subject matter expert and facilitate discussion. The subject matter experts will evaluate the suggestion and recommend revisions to the UAT. These revisions are reported to the librarian for implementation versioned releases.

Results

We anticipate the result of this project to be a continually evolving controlled vocabulary, which will be used as a common language across publishers and platforms to connect articles, data sets, and astronomical objects. We also hope this unified vocabulary will inspire a new range of cross-silo data sharing tools.

Conclusion

Thus far the UAT has received considerable support from the American Institute of Physics, Institute of Physics, the American Astronomical Society, and the Astrophysics Data System. We have begun collecting a list of volunteers to edit the UAT and are continuing our evaluating of tools and resources to facilitate the continuous evolution of terminology in astronomy and astrophysics.