The Star*s Family of Astronomy Resources on the Web

André HECK

Daniel EGRET, François OCHSENBEIN

The Star*s Family is a line of products offering detailed information on astronomical organizations as well as services of general and practical utility for astronomers and related space scientists.

Several resources are fully operational on the WWW:

• StarWorlds: a database of organisations, institutions, associations, companies, and so on, currently gathering together more than 5,000 entries from about 100 countries with all practical details available and *active* URLs; it is reachable via the URL http://cdsweb.u-strasbg.fr/starworlds.html;

• StarHeads: a database of personal WWW pages of individual currently gathering together more than 1,000 entries and reachable via the URL http://cdsweb.u-strasbg.fr/starheads.html;

• StarBits: a dictionary of abbreviations, acronyms, contractions, symbols, and so on, currently gathering together about 85,000 entries; it is reachable via the URL http://cdsweb.u-strasbg.fr/starbits.html.

The Star*s Family resources offer outstanding advantages such as a twenty-year tradition/experience in compilations, a resulting good exhaustivity of entries (including thousands of entries still without WWW link), an homegeneous coverage of all practical data, a permanent updating and quality checking scheme (including authentication of data originators), the largest amount of URLs available in a set of astronomy resources, a unique astronomy-oriented dictionary of acronyms and abbreviations, and so on.