10 Future developments

In the near future, the CDS team expects to go on enriching the database contents and system functionality. The users play an important role in that respect, by giving feedback on the desired features, on the user-friendliness of the interfaces, etc.

In the context of interoperability of distributed services, as currently discussed within the ISAIA project (Interoperable Systems for Archival Information Access; Hanisch [2000]), SIMBAD is prepared to deliver resource profiles and to format the query outputs in a standard way, for instance XML (Ochsenbein et al. [2000]).

As larger and larger astronomical datasets are being produced, the CDS is studying the concepts of a new generation database of several billion objects, instead of the current several million objects. We expect SIMBAD to remain an essential tool for astronomical research in the years to come.

Acknowledgements

CDS acknowledges the support of INSU-CNRS, the Centre National d'Études Spatiales (CNES), and Université Louis Pasteur (ULP, Strasbourg). Many of the current developments of SIMBAD have been made possible by long-term support from NASA, ESA, and ESO. We thank more specifically J. Mead and G. Riegler (NASA), P. Benvenuti (ESA/ST-ECF), and P. Quinn (ESO) for their help in setting up the current agreements.

Developing and maintaining the database is a collective undertaking to which many contributors - too numerous to be listed here - are associated. A special mention shall be made of M.-J. Wagner, F. Woelfel, J. Marcout (Strasbourg), A. Beyneix, G. Chassagnard (IAP, Paris), N. Ralite, S. Pasquier (Bordeaux), E. Davoust (Toulouse), and B. Skiff (Lowell Observatory), who are watching with great care over the SIMBAD contents.

We want finally to thank Jean Delhaye, Jean Jung, Carlos Jaschek and Michel Crézé for their leadership and their vision in the consecutive early phases of the SIMBAD project.