Subject: Draft of AstroWeb announcement in CDS Bulletin

From: Andre HECK <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 06 May 94 14:09:16 +0200

Dear Friends,

Please find below a TeX file as a *very first* draft of a short presentation
of AstroWeb for the CDS Information Bulletin. The strict deadline for the
next issue of this periodical is May 15, so I would need your input as soon as
possible. I am sorry for the short delay, but I was busy during the past weeks
with intense work on other projects.

I organized the paper along the following structure: AW aim and purpose,
membership, structure of the documents, how to get connected to AW, how to
contribute to AW. I deliberately excluded historical and technical details
that are not of direct interest to potential AW users and kept the paper as
short as possible to have a chance it be read by as many people as possible.
You will notice that I often used excerpts of existing AW documents. A couple
of figures will be added.

The paper for Astron. Astrophys. Suppl. could have the same structure if you 
feel it appropriate. We could be more specific on the categorization of entries,
but, definitely, this paper should be short too in order to facilitate
acceptance.

Please check your affiliations as I am not sure I got all of them right. Be also 
careful there is no political statement implying youself or your institution 
beyond what it should be.

All the best,
Andre.

*************************************
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\def\bang{\item{$\bullet$}}
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\eject \null \pp {\narrower

\centerline{\ww The AstroWeb Database}

\bigskip \bigskip

\noindent
R.\ Jackson$^1$, D.\ Wells$^2$, H.M.\ Adorf$^3$, D.\ Egret$^4$, A.\ Heck$^5$,
A.\ Koekemoer$^6$ and F.\ Murtagh$^3$

\bigskip

{\rm \parskip 3pt plus 1pt

\item{$^1$} Space Telescope Science Institute, Homewood Campus, 3700 San Martin
Drive, Baltimore MD 21218, U.S.A.\ {\it ([email-masked])}

\item{$^2$} National Radio Astronomy Observatory, 520 Edgemont Road,
Charlottesville VA 22903-2475, U.S.A.\ {\it ([email-masked])}

\item{$^3$} Space Telescope -- European Coordinating Facility, c/o European
Southern Observatory, Karl-Schwarzschild-Stra\ss e, D-85748 Garching, Germany
{\it ([email-masked] \& [email-masked])}

\item{$^4$} Centre de Donn\'ees astronomiques de Strasbourg, c/o Observatoire
Astronomique, 11 rue de l'Universit\'e, F-67000 Strasbourg, France
{\it ([email-masked])}

\item{$^5$} Observatoire Astronomique, 11 rue de l'Universit\'e, F-67000
Strasbourg, France {\it ([email-masked])}

\item{$^6$} Australian National University, Mount Stromlo and Siding Spring 
Observatories, Private Bag, Weston Creek ACT 2611, Australia
{\it ([email-masked])}

\par}

\bigskip \bigskip \noindent {\yy 1. Generalities}

\noindent
AstroWeb is a new WorldWideWeb (White, 1993) resource providing links to 
astronomy resources available on Internet and using the Mosaic (Harding, 1994)
client tool. Links are anchors or harpoons to the listed resources
provided through implicit Universal Resource Locators (URLs) that can also be
pointers towards anonymous ftp accounts as well as towards gopher (Anklesaria
\& McCahill, 1993) services.

\noindent
This AstroWeb database of resource records is maintained by the authors who
are members of the {\ip AstroWeb Consortium} and located at five institutions:
CDS, MSSSO, NRAO, ST-ECF and STScI (see the detailed affiliations above).

\noindent
Each of these institutions supports a version of the AstroWeb service. The
five separate versions have different styles and contents, but all are
computed from the same master database, which is coded in an agreed
interchange format.

\noindent
The AstroWeb database merges resource listings that were earlier maintained
independently at the five institutions in a effort of providing a unique and
more complete resource database. This eliminated also the need to check
several different and largely redundant lists.

\bigskip \noindent {\yy 2. Structure of AstroWeb Documents}

\noindent
Each resource record is categorized and many resources have a paragraph
describing the resource and containing links to other records (see example
in Fig.\ 1). Different presentations of the master listing are available,
sorted by category, Internet domain, protocol and name, and name. There is
also a searchable version of the merged resource listing, using a WAIS
(Fullton, 1993) index.

\noindent
The database is queried on a regular basis to identify which URLs no longer
work and the merged listing is edited to reflect these changes.

\noindent
Fig.\ 2 reflects the current statistics of the various categories of entries
in the master database. It would be interesting to compare them with the
situation by the time this report is read.

\bigskip \noindent {\yy 3. Connecting to AstroWeb}

\noindent
Astroweb is available at:
{\parskip 0pt plus 1 pt
\bang http://cdsweb.u-strasbg.fr/astroweb.html (CDS site)
\bang http://meteor.anu.edu.au/anton/astronomy.html (MSSSO site)
\bang http://fits.cv.nrao.edu/www/astronomy.html (NRAO site)
\bang http://ecf.hq.eso.org/astro-resources.html (ST-ECF site)
\bang http://stsci.edu/net-resources.html (STScI site). \par}

\noindent
In each site, the successive panels are self-explanatory and provide also links
to the other sites. 

\bigskip \noindent {\yy 4. Contributing to AstroWeb}

\noindent
The AstroWeb database has been designed to facilitate distributed maintenance.
The AstroWeb Consortium welcomes also contributions of resource records to the 
database.

\noindent
Specific on-line facilities have been made available for this purpose. There are
also HTML forms by which new resources can be added ({\ip AstroWeb Resource
Entry Form}) and existing resources can be edited ({\ip AstroWeb Database Correction
Report Form}).

\bigskip \noindent {\yy 5. References}

\noindent \hangindent=15mm \hangafter=1
Anklesaria, F. \& McCahill, M.\ 1993, {\ip The Internet gopher}, in {\ip 
Intelligent Information Retrieval: The Case of Astronomy and Related Space 
Sciences}, eds.\ A.\ Heck \& F.\ Murtagh, Kluwer Acad.\ Publ., Dordrecht, pp.\ 
119-125.

\noindent \hangindent=15mm \hangafter=1
Fullton, J.\ 1993, {\ip WAIS}, in {\ip Intelligent Information Retrieval: The 
Case of Astronomy and Related Space Sciences}, eds.\ A.\ Heck \& F.\ Murtagh, 
Kluwer Acad.\ Publ., Dordrecht, pp.\ 113-117.

\noindent \hangindent=15mm \hangafter=1
Hardin, J.\ 1994, {\ip Human collaborations technologies for the Internet -- NCSA
Mosaic and NCSA Collage}, in {\ip Proc.\ Third Annual Conf.\ on Astron.\ Data
Analysis Software and Systems -- ADASS 1993}, in press.

\noindent \hangindent=15mm \hangafter=1
White, B.\ 1993, {\ip WorldWideWeb (WWW)}, in {\ip Intelligent Information 
Retrieval: The Case of Astronomy and Related Space Sciences}, eds.\ A.\ Heck \& 
F.\ Murtagh, Kluwer Acad.\ Publ., Dordrecht, pp.\ 127-133.

\par} \vfill \eject \end

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