Subject: Re: invitation

From: [email-masked] (anton koekemoer) (by way of [email-masked] (Hans-Martin Adorf))
Date: Mon, 14 Mar 1994 07:30:49 +0100

Dear Hans-Martin,

        Thanks very much for your invitation; I'd be most interested in joining
the consortium as well as being added to the email exploder. The tools you
mentioned sound very useful in maintaining up-to-date versions of these lists.

        Perhaps it would be useful if I told you the story of why I initially
created the list - it started off as a hotlist that grew too big :). While the
STScI and NRAO lists were in no way incomplete, I found that I needed a concise
list of places, not sorted by the type of service (http, ftp, gopher, wais)
since these often mean duplications and they also change. Initially all the
places were simply listed alphabetically and not by country, although similar
names such as NRAO/MRAO mean that country-sorting is rather useful. I also
thought long and hard about separating the list into optical/radio/other, but
decided that since many institutions do multi-waveband research (many people,
in fact) such distinctions may be hazy and therefore I never did this. Since
then, Don Wells sorted his list in that way and the classifications have turned
out to be somewhat more straightforward than I'd imagined. My own distinction
between 'telescopes' and 'observatories' is also rather indefinite; basically a
'telescope' is a place where the permanent residents are mainly technical and
support staff and all observers are temporary, while 'observatories' are closer
to institutions in that they have permanent academic research staff. Somewhat
semantic I guess. I've not sorted the telescopes by country since many of the
sites have multi-national telescopes as well as multiple telescopes belonging
to different countries. Even telescope location is difficult with things such
as EVN.

        I would be very interested in participating in any discussions
currently being held regarding astronomy information on the net, since I feel
that the current lists all have their own particular merits. Would it also be
possible for me to find somewhere a summary of the email discussions to date?

                                                cheers,
                                                 - anton.

---

From: dwells (Don Wells)
Date: Mon, 14 Mar 94 08:28:13 EST

Dear Anton (etal.),

anton koekemoer) (by way of [email-masked]
	(Hans-Martin Adorf) writes:
 > the consortium as well as being added to the email exploder. ..
                                   ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
                                         DONE. current list is:

Don Wells         <[email-masked]>
Bob Jackson       <[email-masked]>
Hans-Martin Adorf <[email-masked]>
Andre HECK        <[email-masked]>
Daniel Egret      <[email-masked]>
anton koekemoer   <[email-masked]>

 > ... Would it also be

    file://fits.cv.nrao.edu/fits/traffic/astroweb/

This directory contains all of the traffic transmitted by the astroweb
Email exploder since its creation about six weeks ago. Much other
discussion occurred in private Email. 

                -*-

I am very pleased that you accepted our invitation, Anton.  I am
impressed by your list, especially by your list of lists and your
'observing schedule' category, which is not represented in any of the
four lists already in our master database. I agree that our multiple
styles are all valid. I also agree that it is often hard to decide
what are the appropriate classification categories.

Our current master merged resource list is

    http://fits.cv.nrao.edu/www/yp_master.html (AKA yp_topzone.html)

You are welcome to use the master list in any way you see fit.
It is the combination of four lists: STScI, ST-ECF, NRAO and CDS.
The format of the master was agreed in the first negotiation of the
group, about six weeks ago. It is most similar (although not
identical) to the STScI style. I transformed the four original files
into the agreed exchange format; my fingers are now well-trained, and
will be willing and able to translate your list too.

The fact that we have a standard format for the database, in HTML,
does not mean that presentations of the data must be in the same
format. For example, page 

    http://fits.cv.nrao.edu/www/yp_astro_info.html

is most of the records in the database formatted in a style which is
very similar to Hans-Martin's ST-ECF list. This page was computed by
the 'stecf' option of the Makefile

    file://fits.cv.nrao.edu/www/astroweb/Makefile

which invokes program

    file://fits.cv.nrao.edu/www/astroweb/dtsplit.awk

plus programs dtsort.awk and dtnodd.awk in the same directory. You
are, of course, welcome to use this software in any way that you see
fit. You are also welcome to invent new programs!

The fact that there is currently a unique master file does not
necessarily mean that there must be only one master file. The
important thing is the standard exchange format for resource records.
Program dtsort.awk was designed to merge resource lists. The idea is
that two files can be concatenated (with Unix 'cat') and dtsort.awk
will sort the concatenated file and will delete duplicate records.
This means that multiple people can edit the same file, each working
on their own copy of it, and that each can independently collect and
merge the files maintained by other people.

Regards,
Don

  Donald C. Wells         Associate Scientist         [email-masked]
                    http://fits.cv.nrao.edu/~dwells
  National Radio Astronomy Observatory                +1-804-296-0277
  520 Edgemont Road,   Charlottesville, Virginia       22903-2475 USA