WWW IN ASTRONOMY AND RELATED SPACE SCIENCES

The astronomical community has become rapidly a wide user of the World Wide Web. It proved to be particularly useful at many different level s: individual institutes providing descriptions of their local facilit ies, often including links to staff personal pages; distributed organi zations, often at an international scale, with cross-referenced sets o f documents from different sites; databases and information systems re lated to specific space or ground-based observing facilities; networks of astronomical or related space science facilities listed above; yel low-page services and compilations of anchors towards all these servic es, including databases of personal pages, which can be browsed or sea rched by keywords. The most prominent examples of combined metadatabas es and yellow-page services in the field are the compilations set up a t five different sites internationally by the AstroWeb consortium and the different complementary products of the Star s Family of astronom y resources. This paper gives a review of the situation of the Web pen etration in the fields concerned, illustrated by a diversity of exampl es. Future needs are identified.