The CATS Service: an Astrophysical Research Tool
  We describe the current status of CATS (astrophysical CATalogs Support
system), a publicly accessible tool maintained at Special Astrophysical
Observatory of the Russian Academy of Sciences (SAO RAS) (http://cats.sao.ru)
allowing one to search hundreds of catalogs of astronomical objects discovered
all along the electromagnetic spectrum. Our emphasis is mainly on catalogs of
radio continuum sources observed from 10 MHz to 245 GHz, and secondly on
catalogs of objects such as radio and active stars, X-ray binaries, planetary
nebulae, HII regions, supernova remnants, pulsars, nearby and radio galaxies,
AGN and quasars. CATS also includes the catalogs from the largest extragalactic
surveys with non-radio waves. In 2008 CATS comprised a total of about 10e9
records from over 400 catalogs in the radio, IR, optical and X-ray windows,
including most source catalogs deriving from observations with the Russian
radio telescope RATAN-600. CATS offers several search tools through different
ways of access, e.g. via web interface and e-mail. Since its creation in 1997
CATS has managed about 10,000 requests. Currently CATS is used by external
users about 1500 times per day and since its opening to the public in 1997 has
received about 4000 requests for its selection and matching tasks.
