8 Future developments

An important direction of development in the near future is the possibility of providing access to images from other sky surveys or deep field observations: obvious candidates are the DENIS (Epchtein [1998]) and 2MASS (Skrutskie [1998]) near-infrared surveys. The first public point source catalogues resulting from these surveys are already available through ALADIN, since they are included in the VIZIER service. This has already proved useful for validating survey data in preliminary versions of the DENIS catalogue (Epchtein et al. [1999]).

The CDS team will also continue to enrich the system functionality. The users play an important role in that respect, by giving feedback on the desired features and user-friendliness of the interfaces.

New developments are currently considered as additional modules which will be incorporated to the general release only when needed, possibly as optional downloads, in order to keep the default version simple and efficient enough for most of the Web applications.

On a longer term, the CDS is studying the possibility of designing data mining tools that will help to make a fruitful use of forthcoming very large surveys, and will be used for cross-matching several surveys obtained, for instance, at different wavelengths. A first prototype, resulting from a collaboration between ESO and CDS, in the framework of the VLT scientific environment is currently being implemented (Ortiz et al. [1999]).

Acknowledgements

CDS acknowledges the support of INSU-CNRS, the Centre National d'Études Spatiales (CNES), and Université Louis Pasteur.

We are indebted to Michel Crézé who initiated the project while being Director of the CDS, and to all the early contributors to the ALADIN project: Philippe Paillou, Joseph Florsch, Houri Ziaeepour, Éric Divetain, Vincent Raclot.

Collaboration with STScI, and especially with the late Barry Lasker, and with Brian McLean, is gratefully acknowledged. We thank Jean Guibert and René Chesnel from CAI/MAMA for their continuous support to the project.

The Digitized Sky Survey was produced at the Space Telescope Science Institute under U.S. Government grant NAG W-2166. The images of these surveys are based on photographic data obtained using the Oschin Schmidt Telescope on Palomar Mountain and the UK Schmidt Telescope.

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