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Jim
As some of you may know, the U.S. National Science Foundation has funded the creation of the Clearinghouse for Networked Information Discovery and Retrieval. One of the responsibilities of CNIDR is to promote the use and development of tools for discovering and using networked information. We have been specifically charged with the task of providing an evolutionary path for the public-domain version of WAIS, the Wide Area Information Server. Therefore, we have been paying close attention to the remarks and "wish lists" provided by the network community, and are well into a project to try to fulfill those wishes.
We are in the early beta test stages of a new generation of WAIS-like systems that build on the heritage of WAIS as released by Thinking Machines, but with quite a bit of extensibility and new features. Specifically, and with the help of many others, we're creating a Z39.50-92 (soon to be 93) server with full backwards compatibility with current WAIS clients and indexes, features such as boolean search, formatted searching on fielded text information, thesaurus based synonym substitution, stemming, and a search engine integration toolkit.
While the server maintains compatibility with current WAIS clients, it will also allow searches and retrievals from any Z39.50 client capable of recognizing the BIB-1 or INFO-1 attribute sets. Clients developed for this system will also be able to interact with library automation systems within the constraints of the attribute sets. We also hope to provide a tool to make various Z39.50 server maintenance tasks easier.
We hope to support the following Z39.50 features:
1) BIB-1 and dynamic INFO-1 ssearches
2) ES-1 element sets, which allow even more retrieval flexibility than the current WAIS server.
3) Access and resource control - essentially, this will allow for secure servers and servers that can accept billing information from the user.
4) EXPLAIN. Smart clients can use the EXPLAIN facility in conjunction with their preferred attribute set to provide customized search options for the user.
Basic search engine features (configurable):
Synonym lookup
Stemming
Formatted field searches
Boolean search logic (to be added before release)
We have not yet begun to create the search engine toolkit as we think we need more user input, and the clients are rudimentary at best. We do hope to have the server running and ready for beta-test by February, although alpha code will be available much sooner. Clients wil take somewhat longer as user interface development can be quite time consuming. The entire system will, of course, be freely available for use and modification by the network community.
On the client side, work is progressing on clients for the Macintosh and Unix systems, with a PC client in the wings.
So, when will this wonderful thing be ready? We actually have a server running that answers both WAIS and Z39.50-1992 queries on the same port, but returns results in a non-standard transfer syntax. We are in the process of changing this to support INFO-1 generic data records, and hope to have that completed soon.
We have had many comments from interested folks asking us to make these plans known to the rest of the network community, and at the risk of announcing vaporware, are doing so.
How can you help? We have already had quite a bit from many people, most notably John Kunze at the University of California at Berkeley and Clifford Lynch at UCOP. John created most of the server code and designed the INFO-1 attribute set as well as the ES-1 element set structures. I have made the server modifications to support free-text searching and WAIS compatibility, as well as making the necessary changes to the WAIS search engine. Members of Joan Gargano's staff at the University of California at Davis are now working on X Windows clients.
We are looking for folks willing to work on clients and run beta-test servers with their current WAIS information bases. Once our transfer syntax code is firmed up, trial servers will be made available for this purpose.
As technical manager for the Clearinghouse (as of December 1), I will help coordinate development tasks and incorporate any of your contributions into releases (with attribution, of course). We also have staff who will provide documentation and support for final releases.
Your comments and suggestions are welcome, and we look forward to hearing from you.
------ Jim Fullton Clearinghouse for Networked Information Discovery and Retrieval Phone: (919)-248-9247 E-Mail: fullton@concert.net