Summary and future prospects

CATS is being expanded continuously. Now (March 1997) it comprises over 150 catalogs and big tables including most of the RATAN--600 catalogs, ninety the biggest world radio astronomical catalogs with number of objects more than 1500, hypertext documentation and full scientific references for every catalog (3 Mb), systems of coordinates transformations, software for spectral data processing, and occupies 450 Mb, while most of catalogs storaged in compress (gzip) files.

The development of the CATS will provide a simple and convenient access to astrophysical information and accelerate the process of obtaining characteristics of celestial objects. Operation with the database will permit astronomers to search for peculiar objects and study physical processes in sources of cosmic radiation.

The CATS allows not only getting accurate positions of radio sources and study of radio spectra, but also deriving different statistical properties of object samples. Trushkin & Verkhodanov (1995) recently demonstrated such possibilies in a cross--identification of two large catalogs in two different frequency ranges: the IRAS (InfraRed Astronomical Satellite) Catalog (about 550.000 objects) and the UTRAO survey (about 70.000 objects) at 365 MHz.

Using the CATS database several projects of informational systems, unifying (1) the database RAC of Astronomical Institute of Saint Petersburg State University (Gubanov & Titov, 1995), (2) the registration system MCOSS of the RATAN--600 (Chernenkov, 1996) (3) the flexible astronomical data processing system (FADPS) (Verkhodanov et al., 1993), were proposed (Andernach et al., 1996; Trushkin et al., 1996). These projects include both scientific goals in obtaining of new and archived astrophysical data to study physics of celestial objects, and educational problems in involving students in the scientific process via using data bases for getting statistical properties of objetcs and creation new programs.

Authors are thankful to Dr.H.Andernach for very fruitful collaboration and providing a great number of atstrophysical catalogs. This project is supported by the Russian Foundation of Basic Research (grant No 96-07-89075).