The confusing situation of the nomenclature of the astronomical objects led us to build, as a first step, a dictionary of the designations presently used. The future publication of this work is supported by Commission 5 of IAU. A brief description of this dictionary, as well as a sample of it, is given here. The designations (acronyms) will be given, together with the format, the total number of objects, the type of objects, the code for the complete bibliographical reference, the signification of acronym… Nomenclature for X and γ-ray sources, designations by constellations and descriptive designations will be dealt with as well. Good compilations are a considerable help in nomenclature problems; every effort should be made in order of : 1) urging specialists to build compilations 2) announce compilations in progress to Astronomical Data Centers and to the present authors.

For the purpose of Cataloguing diffuse objects in a wide range of dimensions, two alternative proposals are presented.

Problems similar to those discussed in connection with the nomenclature of optical HII-regions may occur with any diffuse objects such as molecular clouds, large reflection nebulae, HI-regions, and, of course, radio HII-regions.

The radio HII-regions are most commonly designated by the galactic numbers “G”. The galactic longitude forms the first part of this number, the galactic latitude the second part, both parts being usually accurate to the first decimal digit and separated by the sign of latitude. This system (also used sometimes for optical objects) was introduced by Mezger and Henderson (1967) in a survey at 5 GHz, with a half power beam width of the telescope of about 6'. The angular dimensions of their objects were in the range from 3 to 11'.

The evolution of the Catalogue of Stellar Identifications (C.S.I.) developed by the Stellar Data Center (C.D.S.) is summarized in Table 1; a microfiche edition of this fundamental file is described in another paper (Ochsenbein et al, 1981), and recent developements of this file are presented.

The present situation regarding data for astronomy and astrophysics is dominated by two factors: large increase of data and better accessibility, mainly due to the existence of data centres. An attempt to centralize the information of plate vaults is also presented.

The UK 1.2m Schmidt Telescope (an outstation of the Royal Observatory Edinburgh) is situated at Siding Spring Observatory in New South Wales, Australia. The telescope has been operational since 1973 and has, to date, taken about 7000 plates. This paper discusses some of the problems associated with cataloguing these plates and keeping track of their locations.

This paper shortly describes a software procedure for the on line information retrieval from astronomical plates archives. The procedure is active in Padova Asiago Observatory and will be improved linking them with other retrieval and graphic procedures acting on astronomical catalogues.

Modern microdensitometers and image processing software suggest the possibility that it may soon be feasible to utilize the enormous amount of photometric and positional data potentially available on existing photographic plates. This paper describes the possibility of large-scale surveys and outlines a method for densitometric calibration of plates from an analysis of the detailed structure of the star images on the plate.

To illustrate the range of storage and retrieval facilities and data products that are involved in space astronomy, the present situation on data from some instruments on the following missions is presented: Small Astronomy Satellite-B, Orbiting Astronomical Observatory 3, High Energy Astrophysics Observatory 2, International Ultraviolet Explorer, Viking Orbiter, and Solar Maximum Mission. In addition the Coordinated Data Analysis Workshops conducted at the National Space Science Data Center are outlined to demonstrate the usefulness of building a problem-oriented on-line data base from instruments flown on a number of spacecraft and operating from ground-based facilities.

The catalog will provide lists of stars for about fifthy groups of determined spectral peculiarity. The adopted selection procedure, the connection to the C.D.S. data base and the future developments are described.

Current progress on the visual double star Index and Observation Catalogues is discussed. In addition, a new edition of the visual binary orbit catalogue is being prepared.

The present state of the compilation of the Metacatalogue of galaxies is described by Kalinkov et al. (1981). The preparation of the catalogue originated from the necessity to put on magnetic tape Zwicky’s catalogue in order to study the distribution of galaxies and clusters of galaxies. Enlarging the Metacatalogue by joining to it other catalogues, some interesting results for the large scale structure in the Universe have been obtained. New methods for efficient data processing have been developed for smoothing and filtering of discrete fields, for computing the two-cell correlation function and its matrix representation to test homogeneity and isotropy, and so on (Kalinkov, 1974, 1976, 1977).

To study the large scale structure of the Universe, we started several years ago the compilation of a new type of catalogue – a metacatalogue of optical extragalactic objects, on magnetic tape. This catalogue may be regarded to some extent as a data bank but it will also include characteristics, reduced to homogeneous systems. The Metacatalogue will contain information for galaxies, clusters of galaxies, counts of galaxies and bibliographical data. Until now some files for individual catalogues and lists have been created, which may be used also before their merging into the Metacatalogue.

A Cluster of Galaxies Data Center is in the process of being settled. Its aim will be to collect the data presently scattered in the literature, concerning clusters of galaxies, in all wavelength ranges. We describe its diverse entries and we discuss some specific problems and its possible future utilization.

We present a project of centralization of extragalactic data concerning normal galaxies.

The project of creating a data bank about galaxies is an old dream. Knut Lundmark had already thought of such a project, but the work never came to anything. The use of computers has made this work possible.

The compilation of a machine-readable catalogue of relatively bright galaxies was undertaken in Abastumani Astrophysical Observatory (Kogoshvili 1972; 1975) in order to facilitate the statistical analysis of a large observational material on galaxies from the Palomar Sky Survey. This catalogue is mainly based on the data from the MCG catalogue (Vorontsov-Veljaminov et al, 1962-1968) supplied with information from the UGC (Nilson, 1973), RCBG (De Vaucouleurs and De Vaucouleurs, 1964), CGCG catalogues (Zwicky et al, 1961-1968) and from other sources.

In the Geneva photometry, a photometric box around a so-called central star is the set of stars having almost the same colours as this central star.

For the most current applications, it is useful to construct the boxes of a few hundred stars. A method allowing to obtain these boxes rapidly is described. It is based on socalled direct access square files. A FORTRAN routine on a UNIVAC 1160 computer is widely used at the Geneva Observatory. The principles described in this paper may be easily adapted to build square files and to write routines in evolved languages for most computers.

Other applications of square files are also outlined.

The stars in the FK4- and FK4Sup-Catalogue are supplied with visual magnitudes and spectral types essentially on the basis of the Henry Draper Catalogue. There are several good arguments, to compile additional astrometric, photometric and spectroscopic data for these stars. Not only to detect astrometric effects, which can produce errors in the fundamental system, like magnitude equation, colour equation, and foreshorthening effect. For the last one distances and radial velocities have to be known. But also to study the kinematics of the FK4/FK4Sup stars, in profiting from their high precision in proper motion.