MEDIA RELATIONS,
VISNJAN OBSERVATORY,
HR-52463 VISNJAN, CROATIA, TEL/FAX: +385 52 449 212
http://www.astro.hr
Released on August 1, 1999. Contact : Mario Juric
Visnjan Observatory, CARNet and Oracle Hrvatska sign VOID2 project contract
Visnjan Observatory, Croatian Academic And Research Network (CARNet) and Oracle Hrvatska (subsidiary of Oracle Corporation, NASDAQ:ORCL) have signed a sponsorship and cooperation contract
on development and creation of Visnjan Observatory Image Database 2 (VOID 2) system. VOID 2 is a comprehensive database of data relevant to minor body research community, with special emphasis given to observer support services
for small and mid-scale followup programs. The data in VOID 2 includes up-to-date orbital elements of minor planets and comets, individual measurements of objects, field centers and image data of Visnjan Observatory followup
programs (and others), and historical asteroid information (discovery details, descriptions of names, images, etc.). Public access to VOID 2 will be enabled through WWW interface (the VOID 2 Web Service). VOID 2 Web Service will
expose a set of tools for observation planning and prediscovery searches, together with a query interface to underlying VOID 2 Database. To minimize overlaps in functionality, VOID 2 Web Service will be extensively linked with
other existing databases and web services (JPLs HORIZONs, MPC, Lowell Observatory, NEODys, etc.). According to the terms of the contract signed, Visnjan Observatory's Mario Juric will head the development and deployment of VOID
2 system, with CARNet supplying the hardware (a Sun ULTRA 5 workstation) and Oracle Hrvatska supplying the Oracle 8.0.5 Enterprise RDBMS server for support of underlying database functionality. Beta version of VOID 2 Web Service
is expected to be available somewhere in the beginning of December 1999. Stay tuned !