The AstroWeb Database

The AstroWeb database was designed to facilitate distributed maintenance; in particular, it is coded in an agreed interchange format . Concurrent maintenance work was done at both MSSSO and NRAO during March 1994; copies of the database were edited in parallel and the merging of concurrent changes was assisted by the AstroWeb toolset. From about 1994-07-01 until about 1999-05-15 the STScI version was the master database, but now the master is at the CDS. As of 1999-05-25 it is about a megabyte of text containing about 2850 resource records ( most recent statistics ). Members of the Consortium edit the master database with a set of tools coded in Tcl (Tool control language). The database can be sorted in a variety of ways:

Contributing Records to the Database

The Consortium welcomes contributions of resource records to the database:

Click here to submit an addition or change to the Astroweb database

Click here to review resource records which have been submitted but not yet processed.

Click here to review Astroweb records changed in the past month.

Click here to send EMail to the Consortium members.

AstroWeb Software

The Consortium has developed a variety of software to support database maintenance as well as the creation of various presentation formats from the master database:

• Tools are available for syntax-checking, sorting and classifying resource records. These tools are coded in the AWK language .
• The database-search utility and the URL-validator are coded in the Tcl language . The latter tool tests essentially all of the URLs in the Astroweb database once every 24 hours, and produces a failure report for the Consortium members.

dwells@nrao.edu last changed this page 1999-05-25.