Subject: Re: AstroWeb meets Harvest

From: [email-masked] (Hans-Martin Adorf)
Date: Thu, 17 Nov 1994 10:38:27 +0100

Bob,

I had a quick look at it. It's approximately what I had in mind when
suggesting that one might wish to index all astronomical HTML pages (it
indexes the top nodes).

The harvest results are a bit cryptic at times; we may get used to it, but
I have some doubts about the average astronomer. In any case, I support
including it in the services we offer, since we have nothing better at this
time.

Cheers
Hans-Martin

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From: [email-masked] (Don Wells)
Date: Thu, 17 Nov 94 10:26:31 EST

I tried several simple searches on keywords; for example, I think one
of them was "vlbi". As we would expect, the searches did find
references in pages that were not in the main AstroWeb
database. However, the surprise for me was how few new "hits" I made
in my trials; my tentative conclusion is that the degree of
completeness of AstroWeb itself is rather good.  Of course, this may
just be saying that AstroWeb records are a reasonable summary of the
content of their URLs, and that the content of those top-level URLs
does not point to very many new resources. It is conceivable that we
could make new discoveries by harvesting more than one level deep.

My remarks are based on a small number of quick, simple trials; more
tests and experiences may show that the present harvested database is
really more effective than I make it sound. Other members of the
AstroWeb consortium should try the search tool and compare its results
to their knowledge of the AstroWeb database, and report their
reactions. 

-Don