Evolution of the NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database (NED) into a Data Mining Discovery Engine. II. Current Contents and Future Plans

Recent advances have been made in evolving the NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database (NED) into a data mining discovery engine. Infrastructure changes and data integration techniques are enabling more than a 10-fold expansion. NED will soon contain over a billion objects with their fundamental attributes (such as names, positions, redshifts, fluxes, and diameters) determined via cross-identifications among the largest sky surveys and over 100,000 smaller but scientifically important catalogs and journal articles. In addition, enhancements to the user interface, including new APIs, VO protocols, and queries involving derived physical quantities, will provide new pathways for multi-wavelength studies of large extragalactic samples.