Searching astro:name with YQL

Searching astro:name with YQL, originally uploaded by Eat your greens!.

The YQL team announced personal URLs for queries this week. I’ve used the new feature to set up a shortcut for looking up photos of astronomical objects by name. The URL is:

http://queries.yahooapis.com/v1/public/yql/eatyourgreens/astrolookup?name=M+42

You can set the name parameter in the URL to change the name of the object you are looking for. I’ve also set up a demo page to render results from this query. The URL is:

http://eatyourgreens.org.uk/testapps/yql/astronamesearch.html?name=Horsehead+nebula

Again, change the name parameter in the URL to lookup different objects. Note that it looks for an exact match with the astro:name machine tag, so looking up stars is cumbersome:

http://eatyourgreens.org.uk/testapps/yql/astronamesearch.html?name=the+star+deneb+(αcyg)

Update: it seems Flickr’s machine tag search can match just the first part of a tag, so you can search for stars by supplying the first part of the tag’s value.

http://eatyourgreens.org.uk/testapps/yql/astronamesearch.html?name=the+star+deneb

I’ve also made some changes to flickr.photos.astro in order to enable faster searching by name. Use astro_name in a query to find objects by matching on astro:name:

select * from flickr.photos.astro where astro_name = 'M 31'

or use text to run a Flickr text search across photo descriptions and titles:

select * from flickr.photos.astro where text = 'orion'

If you want to see what values have been used for astro:name on Flickr, I recommend Paul Mison’s excellent machine tag browser.