Subject: draft of AstroWeb fr ST-ECF Newsletter

From: [email-masked] (Hans-Martin Adorf)
Date: Thu, 20 Oct 1994 16:51:39 +0100

Dear friends,

here is the draft of my AstroWeb article for the next issue of the ST-ECF
Newsletter. Please let me have your comments asap.

Thanks.

Hans-Martin
---------------------------------------------
AstroWeb - Internet resources for astronomers

Hans-Martin Adorf1, Daniel Egret2, André Heck2, Robert Jackson3,
Anton Koekemoer4, Fionn Murtagh1, Don Wells5

1ST-ECF, 2CDS, 3STScI, 4MSSSO, 5NRAO

Abstract: The AstroWeb database is the most complete collection of of
astronomical Internet resources worldwide. It comprises well above
1000 pointers to observatories and societies, telescope schedules,
meteorological information, conferences, publications, data archives,
software and other information services. The AstroWeb page has become
the most wanted item in WISE, the ST-ECF's WWW-based information
system.

The AstroWeb database

The amount of astronomical information easily accessible on the Internet
has grown
explosively over the past year. Particularly the advent of the World Wide Web
(WWW, Adorf 1994) has facilitated access and transfer of textual and image
data. It
has been recognized for quite some time that the wealth of distributed
information
would certainly benefit from some organisational structure.
Early in 1994 several people had individually started to collect interesting
astronomical Internet resources, only to quickly realize that the only way
to proceed
was to merge the different, partially overlapping collections into a
comprehesive
database - the birth of the AstroWeb consortium (Jackson et al. 1994, 1995a,
1995b). Its currently seven members (identical to the authors) are located
at five
different institutions in Europe, the United States, and Australia.
Their primary product, the AstroWeb database, comprises records for FTP,
Gopher, Telnet, USENET Newsgroups, WAIS, and WWW resources, uniquely specified
by their respective Uniform Resource Locators (URLs). Many resources are
already
augmented by a paragraph of descriptive text; some descriptions already contain
links to other entries. If known, the e-mail address of the resources's
maintainer is
stored in the record. As an added value, each record is classified by a
consortium
member according to one or more of ~25 categories, such as observatory,
instrument, abstract, software or people.
The AstroWeb collection complements, and to some extent supersedes the recent
annotated compilation of Internet resources by Andernach, Hanisch & Murtagh
(1994). Being of general interest and being the most complete collection
available,
the AstroWeb database pages have become the most popular items in WISE, the ST-
ECF's WWW-based information system, yielding about 70 downloads per day.

Structure and organisation

The current AstroWeb set-up consists of a master database maintained at the
STScI.
In a highly dynamic enviroment such as the WWW, it is important to
regularly check
the validity of the database entries. Three times a day a demon probes the
primary
URLs of all records (except Telnet URLs), and removes "dead" or "unreliable"
entries from the database.
From the master database different renderings are automatically derived on a
daily basis. For instance, the ST-ECF presentation of the database
(http://ecf.hq.eso.org/astroweb/yp_astro_resources.html) is terse,
permitting quick transfer and reference (suitable for European networks with
relatively low bandwidths). The STScI presentation (http://www.stsci.edu/net-
resources.html), on the other hand, includes the descriptive text, and is more
suitable for initial browsing of the database content. Categories and
resource owners
are usually not displayed, but hidden in HTML comments; these can be viewed
in the
HTML source, if necessary.
At a size of well above 1000 entries it is mandatory that the AstroWeb database
is searchable. To this end a WAIS index (see Adorf 1994b) is maintained at the
STScI, which indexes the titles, descriptions and categories.

HST related resources in AstroWeb

As an example we briefly inspect the current content of the AstroWeb
database with
respect to HST, ST-ECF and STScI.
Searching the database for 'HST or Hubble" retrieves more than 25 records,
including pointers to STScI, ST-ECF, the Space Telescope electronic information
system (STEIS), remote proposal submission (RPS), STSDAS, PSF modeling
software, all three HST archives, HST public relation images, a newsgroup, the
STScI's preprint database, and somewhat surprisingly a gravitational lensing
conference.
Similarly, searching the database for'stecf or ecf' finds more than 30 pointers
to ST-ECF related information, including WISE, the ST-ECF Newsletter, the HST
archive, and all ST-ECF staff.
Finally, searching for 'STScI' reveals 35 records including pointers to STScI
received preprints, STScI authored preprints (searchable abstracts), PASP
abstracts, and IAU circulars.

Submission of new records

The AstroWeb consortium welcomes new contributions. To this end it is
providing a
WWW entry form for entering new records
(http://fits.cv.nrao.edu/www/astroweb/aref.html). Similarly there are entry
forms for requesting modifications to existing records, for entering a personal
anchor, and for reviewing recently submitted records. Each entry or
modification
request is reviewed by a consortium member and, upon acceptance, added
manually to
the database in order to assure continued quality.

Future developments

Several future developments are conceivable, apart from continuing to
collect more
Internet resources. For instance, it would be very helpful, if the AstroWeb
database
were internally fully crossreferenced. Also some community involvement is
currently being considered in order to complete and improve the resource
descriptions. In any case the AstroWeb consortium welcomes suggestions by all
database users (e-mail to [email-masked]).

References

Adorf, H.-M.: 1994a, "Electronic access to HST information II - the World
Wide Web",
ST-ECF Newsl. 21, 31-34.
Adorf, H.-M.: 1994b, "Electronic access to HST information III - WAIS",
ST-ECF Newsl.
22.
Andernach, H., Hanisch, R.J., Murtagh, F.D.: 1994, "Network resources for
astronomers", Publ. Astron. Soc. Pacific, (in press).
Jackson, R., Wells, D., Adorf, H.-M., Egret, D., Heck, A., Koekemoer, A.,
Murtagh, F.:
1994, "The AstroWeb Database", Bull. CDS 45, 21-25.
Jackson, R., Wells, D., Adorf, H.-M., Egret, D., Heck, A., Koekemoer, A.,
Murtagh, F.:
1995a, "AstroWeb - A database of links to astronomy resources - Announcement of
a database", Astron. Astrophys. Suppl. (submitted).
Jackson, R.E., Adorf, H.-M., Egret, D., Heck, A., Koekemoer, A., Murtagh,
F., Wells, D.:
1995b, "AstroWeb - Internet resources for astronomers", in: Proc. Astronomical
Data Analysis Software and Systems (ADASS) '94, Baltimore, MD, D. Shaw, H.
Payne, and J. Hayes (eds.), Astronomical Society of the Pacific, (in press).

Figure captions

Fig. 1: The ST-ECF's top-level WWW page
(http://ecf.hq.eso.org/astroweb/yp_astro_resources.html) of the AstroWeb
database, viewed with EINet's MacWeb browser on the Apple Macintosh.