Star*s Family - StarPages - Outstanding Features

The Star*s Family of Astronomy and Related Resources is a growing collection of directories, dictionaries, databases and related products on astronomy, space sciences, as well as related fields, organizations and people.

The `StarPages' cover more specifically the members of the Star*s Family accessible on the WWW.

The Star*s Family resources offer outstanding features such as

• a twenty-five-year tradition/experience in compilations,
• a resulting excellent exhaustivity of entries (including also thousands of entries without WWW link yet)
  [directory StarGuides and database StarWorlds],
• an homogeneous coverage of all practical data,
• a permanent updating and quality checking scheme, including authentication of data originators and critical evaluation of the information,
• a synonym search engine in the retrieval mechanism,
• the largest amount of URLs or WWW links available in a set of astronomy resources,
  [currently more than 6,500 hots links for StarWorlds and about 6,000 for StarHeads]
• a unique collection (about 200,000 entries) of real acronyms and abbreviations extracted from scanned literature [dictionary StarBriefs and database StarBits],
• and so on.

Our bottomline: we work and provide these services for the benefit of a better communication within the world-wide astronomical community; we also resolutely put the emphasis on the quality, on the homogeneity and on the exhaustivity of the information delivered rather than on developing gimmicks.

We have working relationships with various organizations such as the Astronomical League (AL), the Committee for the Scientific Investigations of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP), the International Astronomical Union (IAU), the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), the NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS), and the World Meteorological Organization (WMO).

Our databases have also been installed at the European Southern Observatory (ESO) (as StarGates and StarWords) and at the ESRIN centre of the European Space Agency (ESA) (as StarWays).