2 Compilations of astronomical Internet resources

At a first level, the user looking for new sources of information can consult compilations of existing resources. Examples of such databases, or yellow-page services are given in this section.

2.1 The StarPages

Star*s Family is the generic name for a collection of directories, dictionaries and databases which has been described in details by Heck ([1995a]) who has been building up their contents for more than twenty-five years. These very exhaustive data sets are carefully updated and validated, thus constituting a gold mine for professional, amateur astronomers, and more generally all those who are curious of space-related activities, and want to locate existing resources.

The Star*s Family of products can be queried on-line from the CDS Web site (Strasbourg, France) under the generic name of StarPages. It includes the following databases:

StarWorlds:

a directory of astronomy, space sciences, and related organizations (Heck et al. [1994]); it includes URLs of Web sites when available, as well as e-mail addresses; unlike most of the services mentioned in the present paper, it is not restricted to describing on-line resources, but also lists directory entries for organizations which do not provide any on-line information.

StarHeads:

individual Web pages essentially of astronomers and related space scientists (Heck [1995b]).

StarBits:

a very comprehensive dictionary of abbreviations, acronyms, contractions, and symbols used in astronomy and space sciences (Heck [1995b]).

All three databases are associated with a query engine based on character string searches. Filters prevent extraction of too large subsets of the database.

   
2.2 AstroWeb

AstroWeb (Jackson et al. [1994]) is a collection of pointers to astronomically relevant information resources available on the Internet. The browse mode of AstroWeb opens a window on the efforts currently developed - in some cases, unfortunately, in a rather disorganized way - for making astronomically related, and hopefully pertinent, information available on-line through the World Wide Web.

AstroWeb is maintained by a small consortium of individuals located at CDS, STScI, MSSSO, NRAO, and Vilspa. The master database is currently hosted at CDS (after having been for a long time at STScI), and all the above-mentioned places, as well as the Institute of Astronomy, Cambridge, host a mirror copy with customized presentation of the same data.

Each URL is checked by a robot on a daily basis to ensure aliveness of all referenced resources. The resource descriptions are usually submitted by the person or organization responsible for the resource, but are checked and eventually modified by one of the consortium members. The search engine is a WAIS search index. The index is constructed from the resource descriptions, and also includes all the words contained in the referenced home page. This latter feature is quite powerful for bringing new names of projects, topics, research groups, very quickly to the index.

Table 1 lists the resources present in the AstroWeb database in December 1999.

   

Table 1: Resources listed in the AstroWeb database (December 1999). The number of resources (Web sites) in each category is given between parentheses. A number of resources appear in more than one category

Organizations	Astronomy Departments (508)
	Professional and Amateur Organizations (159)
	Space Agencies and Organizations (46)
Observing	Observatories and Telescopes (328)
resources	Telescope Observing Schedules (25)
	Meteorological Information (10)
	Astronomical Survey Projects (65)
Data resources	Data and Archive Centers (145)
	Astronomy Information Systems (39)
Abstracts,	Bibliographical Services (29)
Publications,	Astronomical Journals and Publications (90)
Libraries	Astronomy & astrophysics preprints (58)
	Abstracts of Astronomical Publications (29)
	Conference Proceedings (45)
	Astronomy-related Libraries (48)
	Other Library resources (11)
People-related	Personal Web pages (800)
Resources	People (lists) (14)
	Jobs (37)
	Conferences and Meetings (45)
	Newsgroups (31)
	Mailing Lists (16)
Software	Astronomy software servers (129)
Computer	Document Preparation Tools (9)
Science	Overviews & technical notes for protocols (11)
	Computer Science-related Resources (33)
Research areas	Radio Astronomy (109)
Astronomy	Optical Astronomy (178)
Space Physics	High-Energy Astronomy (77)
	Space Astronomy (175)
	Solar Astronomy (77)
	Planetary Astronomy (64)
	History of Astronomy (21)
	Earth, Ocean, Atmosphere, Space Sciences (41)
	Physics-related Resources (91)
Educational	Professional and Amateur Organizations (159)
resources	Educational resources (240)
	Astronomy Pictures (105)
Miscellaneous	Primary Lists of Astronomy Resources (10)
	Other lists of astronomy resources (78)
	Miscellaneous Resources (137)