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Astrobiology Keywords


As part of the Astrobiology Resource Metadata Standard (ARMS), we have developed a set of astrobiology keywords to characterize the content of Astrobiology Resource, such as datasets and research papers.

The ARMS set of keywords is a compilation of publication-style keywords extracted from Astrobiology related journals over the past 10 years 1. After careful curation of the keywords, we developed a 4 tier taxonomy with over 750 taggable keywords.

To help users find and select keywords, they are organized hierarchically, under a top-level structure of 11 categories:

  1. Astronomical
  2. Biological
  3. Chemical
  4. Computational
  5. Environmental
  6. Exploration
  7. Geological
  8. Institutional
  9. Methods
  10. Planetary
  11. Process

We validated the keywords against the abstracts of AbSciCon 2019, and LPSC 2019, using the keywords as automatic indices. We also performed a cluster analysis and enhanced the ARMS lexicon with a few additional keywords present in the AbSciCon 2019 abstracts.

If you would like to browse the keywords hierarchy, click here and expand the list of keywords on the left-hand side of the page.


1. [Our analysis of astrobiology journal keywords includes and augments the sets of keywords independently developed in [Taskin and Aydinoglu 2015] and [Miller, Gazan, and Still 2014]]