Subject: Paper on AstroWeb at ADASS'94

From: Andre HECK <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 07 Jun 94 11:28:04 +0200

As discussed in the past, Bob and myself (at least) will be attending
ADASS'94 and we were ready to take care of such a paper/announcement.
Who exactly is attending ADASS'94?

Andre.

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From: [email-masked]
Date: Tue, 7 Jun 94 14:34:26 +0200

Andre's message: I also hope to get to ADASS'94.  Go ahead as per plan.
In 2 months or so, I'll see about something for the ESO Messenger - 
perhaps partially on AstroWeb.  (For the coming issue, I had to do  
something on the ESO Web).

Two ideas...

(1) Someone asked me recently for a copy of my hotlist.  It is useless 
    giving someone just a list of URLs, even if it is made HTML-readable.
    So I annotated my hotlist, ran a script on it to put it into HTML,
    and set it up in http://http.hq.eso.org/~fmurtagh/web-sites.html
    This can be waisindexed sometime in the future.  There is a public 
    'bibl2html' utility which takes bibtex format as input, but I couldn't 
    get this to work (and anyway, I am not totally emacs-based).  The 
    annotation procedure has to be kept simple.  As opposed to the Mosaic 
    annotation procedure, you need to see the comments before you decide to 
    go to the URL.  (Evidently this could be done by using one's hotlist
    file, and the annotation directory files, and creating an HTML file from
    these, which can then be accessed first.  However being independent 
    means more control over quality of comments, and also confidentiality
    of entries if desired - i.e. they don't have to be entered in the URL
    database.)  Anyone else sharing hotlists?

(2) Personal homepages can be quite informative (while still short), e.g.
    Karl Glazebrook, http://cast0.ast.cam.ac.uk/~kgb/  I think that personal
    research pages could be quite useful.  But I am usually not interested
    in seeing CVs, or photos of weddings, or (out of date) pictures of the 
    person, or phone numbers (which can be more efficiently obtained in other
    ways), etc.  I want to check a personal homepage for the same reason that 
    I might want to listen to such a person give a seminar or conf. talk.  
 
    If one publishes a few papers on some topic, there are often additional
    vulgarisation papers (French sense!) also in such publications as 
    the ESO Messenger, the ST-ECF Newsletter, etc. which may allow a better 
    handle on the topic to someone wishing to get a quick introduction.  So 
    if I were to have a range of papers dealing with, e.g. wavelets and 
    multiresolution in image processing, or forecasting seeing, or neural 
    net approaches, etc., I think a range of introductory reading could be 
    easily provided for access on the Web.  I intend to set up something 
    along these lines.  I can imagine that a site dealing with other topics 
    such as fractal-based methodologies, or (under)sampling problems, could 
    be very valuable.  This is ultimately not really different from the 
    courseware and educational materials available on the Web; or the 
    astronomical textbook being put together on the Web.  Anyone else 
    thinking of coordinating personal research pages like this?  Or 
    maintaining an annotated list of existing personal pages which have 
    some real content?    

--Fionn