WWW in Astronomy and Related Space Sciences

Abstract The astronomical community has become rapidly a wide user of the World Wide Web. It proved to be particularly useful at many different levels: individual institutes providing descriptions of their local facilities, eften including links to staff personal pages; distributed organizations, often at an international scale, with cross-referenced sets of documents from different sites; databases and information systems related to specific space or ground-based observing facilities; networks of astronomical or related space science facilities listed above; yellow-page services and compilations of anchors towards all these services, including databases of personal pages, which can be browsed or searched by keywords. The most prominent examples of combined metadatabases and yellow-page services in the field are the compilations set up at five different sites internationally by the AstroWeb consortium and the different complementary products of the Star ∗ s Family of astronomy resources . This paper gives a review of the situation of the Web penetration in the fields concerned, illustrated by a diversity of examples. Future needs are identified.