A User-Centered Data Base for Astronomy by John Roll (1995), presented at the Fifth Annual Conference on Astronomical Data Analysis Software and Systems, published in Astronomical Data Analysis Software and Systems V, A.S.P. Conference Series, Vol. 101, 1996, George H. Jacoby and Jeannette Barnes, eds., p. 536.

A User-Centered Data Base for Astronomy

John Roll
Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory

Data base management is an increasingly important part of astronomical data analysis. Astronomers need easy and convenient ways of storing, editing, filtering, and retrieving data about data. Commercial data bases do not provide good solutions for many of the everyday and informal types of data base access that are performed by astronomers. An ASCII data base system with simple data file formatting rules and command line data operators has been created to answer this need. The system includes a complete set of relational and set operators, fast search/index and sorting operators and many formatting and i/o operators. Specific features are included to enhance the usefulness of the database when manipulating astronomical data. The software runs under UNIX, MSDOS and IRAF as an external package.


[WCSTools] [WCSTools paper]