CURRENT_MEETING_REPORT_
Reported by Kevin Gamiel/MCNC - CNIDR
Minutes of the Networked Information Retrieval Working Group (NIR)
Jim Fullton gave a general overview of the MCNC Clearinghouse for
Networked Information Discovery and Retrieval (CNIDR). CNIDR is funded
by the National Science Foundation to promote the use and development of
networked information tools and systems.
Anders Gillner from a RARE ISUS task force gave a presentation on the
Eurogopher. The Eurogopher is an attempt to establish a geography-based
as well as subject-based gopher infrastructure throughout Europe.
The NIR report was discussed in some detail and edited by the group.
o It was decided that NCSA's Mosaic for X should not be a stand-alone
category, but rather indicated as a client under the World Wide Web
category.
o The WAIS and freeWAIS categories will be merged as WAIS/freeWAIS.
Brewster Kahle and Jim Fullton will write parallel descriptions of
each and will resubmit those writings to Jill for the next update.
o The Grateful Med item was voted out of the report as it was
generally considered not to be an open network resource. Also
voted to be removed from the report was the group Lister Hill
National Center for Biomedical Communications, National Library of
Medicine.
o Section 3 of the report will be edited to expand all acronyms.
o The ZIT has been dissolved and therefore will be removed from the
report.
o Mark Needleman completed a tool template for the Z39.50 protocol.
Since it is a protocol and not a tool, it was decided to port the
template to a group template on the Z39.50 Implementors Group
(ZIG).
o comp.infosystems.www will be added to the newsgroup templates.
o CNIDR is considering publishing the report on-line. Access could
be via FTP, gopher, Wais, and WWW. Any details will be posted to
the NIR list as they become available (after the meeting, a
representative from the InterNIC expressed interest in doing this
as well).
o It was agreed that the full report should be updated once per year,
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although more regular updating of the individual sections held
on-line should be possible.
Reinhard Doelz discussed his NIR tool checklist. The checklist was very
extensive and ambitious. Several schemes for maintaining the list were
discussed, including on-line telnet ``holes'' allowing the user to
complete the checklist. As a first cut, however, April volunteered to
prune the checklist into a fairly simple list. Reinhard's work was
deemed a useful resource for users deciding on NIR tools and will be
posted to the mailing list.
The group agreed to remove the sections concerning the provision of
documentation and training materials for NIR tools from the charter. It
was agreed that this is too ambitious and out of scope.
Attendees
Chris Adie
[email protected]
Toshiya Asaba
[email protected]
Zavisa Bjelogrlic
[email protected]
Luc Boulianne
[email protected]
Kursat Cagiltay
[email protected]
Jodi-Ann Chu
[email protected]
David Conrad
[email protected]
Reinhard Doelz
[email protected]
Jill Foster
[email protected]
Jim Fullton
[email protected]
Kevin Gamiel
[email protected]
Ben Geerlings
[email protected]
Maria Heijne
[email protected]
Marco Hernandez
[email protected]
Rune Hjelsvold
[email protected]
Per Jacobsen
[email protected]
Xander Jansen
[email protected]
Brewster Kahle
[email protected]
John Kunze
[email protected]
John Lindsay
[email protected]
Anne Lord
[email protected]
April Marine
[email protected]
Linda Millington
[email protected]
Pushpendra Mohta
[email protected]
Lisa Nielsen
[email protected]
Mark Prior
[email protected]
Joyce K. Reynolds
[email protected]
Ulla Sandberg
[email protected]
Rickard Schoultz
[email protected]
Jennifer Sellers
[email protected]
A. Velu Sinha
[email protected]
Patricia Smith
[email protected]
Milan Sova
[email protected]
Bert Stals
[email protected]
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Marc van der Noordaa
[email protected]
Guido van Rossum
[email protected]
Chris Weider
[email protected]
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