Subject: AstroWeb papers

From: Andre HECK <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 11 May 94 07:48:46 +0200

Dear Friends,

You will find below the TeX file of the paper submitted for the CDS
Information Bulletin, including the only suggestions for changes I
received from Bob. There will be two pictures, both screen copies:
Don's homepage for AstroWeb and the CDS Astroweb homepage (since we
are publishing this paper in the CDS Bulletin).

As to Astron. Astrophys. Suppl., I suggest we use basically the similar
stuff, but with another second picture. Suggestions?

All the best,
Andre.

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\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{$^1$} Computer Sciences Corporation, Space Telescope Science Institute, 
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. Links are anchors or hypertext
references to the listed resources provided through implicit Universal
Resource Locators (URLs). 

\noindent
The links provide transparent access to information provided by WorldWideWeb,
Gopher (Anklesaria, 1993), Anonymous FTP, WAIS (Fullton, 1993), USENET News,
and Telnet 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. Fig.\ 1 reproduces the top of the CDS AstroWeb
home page.

\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.
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 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 (from the NRAO AstroWeb home page). 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.

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