The AstroWeb Database
The AstroWeb database was designed to facilitate distributed
maintenance; in particular, it is coded in an agreed interchange
format . Concurrent maintenance work was done at both MSSSO and
NRAO during March 1994; copies of the database were edited in parallel
and the merging of concurrent changes was assisted by the AstroWeb
toolset. From about 1994-07-01 until about 1999-05-15 the STScI
version
was the master database, but now the master is at the CDS. As of
1999-05-25 it
is about a megabyte of text containing about 2850 resource records
(
most recent statistics ). Members of the Consortium edit the
master database with a set of tools coded in Tcl (Tool control
language). The database can be sorted in a variety of
ways:
Contributing Records to the Database
The Consortium welcomes contributions of resource records to the
database:
Click
here
to submit an addition or change to the Astroweb database
Click here
to review resource records which have been submitted but not yet processed.
Click
here to review Astroweb records changed in the past month.
Click here
to send EMail to the Consortium members.
AstroWeb Software
The Consortium has developed a variety of software to support database
maintenance as well as the creation of various presentation formats
from the master database:
- Tools are available for syntax-checking, sorting and classifying
resource records. These tools are coded in the
AWK language
.
- The database-search utility and the URL-validator are coded in the
Tcl language
.
The latter tool tests essentially all of the URLs in the
Astroweb database once every 24 hours, and produces a failure report
for the Consortium members.
dwells@nrao.edu last changed this page 1999-05-25.