WWW ACCESS TO ASTRONOMICAL ARCHIVES AND DATABASES

In this document, an approach to the development of WWW-accessible ast ronomical archives and databases is described, which can easily be ext ended also to other disciplines. The architecture is based on a set of servers running at the archive site, each performing a specialized ta sk: accessing an SQL-based DBMS, retrieving and downlinking 1-D or 2-D data (measurements), displaying quicklook data, or plotting the resul ts of a query to the database. All of the information on the user inte rface is dynamically stored in the database, allowing the pages to be prepared on-the-fly; no additional software needs to be run on the use r's computer. A WWW-accessible test astronomical archive, containing b oth 2-D (images) and 1-D (spectra) data, and having NCSA/Mosaic as an interface is described as an example of successful application of the above concepts.