The Interstellar Space Mosaic: A User Interface for Accessing ISM Data World-wide distributed

Abstract

Data retrieval systems are an essential tool for scientists. Up to a few years ago, user interaction was usually fairly poor, and very often different from one Hardware/Software environment to another. Since one year or less, several portable and user-friendly interactive tools for Network Information Retrieval (NIR) gave us a new and exciting way of interacting with the data in general, and with the astrophysical data in particular. The huge amount of data of astrophysical interest can now be accessed with less pain than ever. The Interstellar Space Mosaic is aimed to be a first attempt to allow transparent access to interstellar medium data in the new NIR scenario, trying to take full advantage of the new tools. This paper will describe the logic structure of this “distributed database of archives”, the data that will become soon available thru it, the advantages (many) and traps (very few) that this new tool is expected to provide.