NED in the Era of Very Large Extragalactic Surveys

The NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database (NED) is in the process of rapid expansion both from the growth of the astrophysics literature and from very large sky surveys containing hundreds of millions of objects. Over the last year alone, over 3 million objects from more than 5 thousand journal articles have been folded into NED. In the same time period, approximately 60 million UV sources from the GALEX All-Sky Survey and Medium Imaging Survey catalogs have been fully integrated into the database. A new data processing approach has been developed to fold in very large catalogs. Firstly, a new NED layer is created to contain the entries from a catalog. Subsequently, the new entries are cross-matched with existent NED objects following a rule-based statistical approach. This new layer currently contains approximately 500 million near-infrared sources from the 2MASS Point Source Catalog. In future releases, we expect to fully integrate this catalog while loading a new layer of hundreds of millions of sources from the new All-WISE survey. To make accessible this wealth of new data, NED is undergoing a major user interface upgrade. As a result of a "near-position" search, the new interface is able to display sources from very large catalogs which have not yet been cross-matched with other NED objects. Navigation and searches have been simplified and enriched. For instance, the "by-parameters" search has been completely revamped and long searches are now queued and executed in the background. The latest release includes a new tool to explore galaxy environments and a guide for authors documenting the best practices to publish data in the major astrophysical journals. Researchers are encouraged to visit the NED exhibit for a demonstration of these and other new capabilities.