The NHSE progress report for Feb 17 to March 12 follows below. Please send comments, questions, or corrections to browne@cs.utk.edu. The next NHSE progress report will be sent out the week of March 20. Please send contributions to browne@cs.utk.edu. Shirley Browne ************************************************************************** Shirley Browne Computer Science Dept. 107 Ayres Hall browne@cs.utk.edu (615) 974-5886 University of Tennessee Research Associate Fax (615) 974-8296 Knoxville, TN 37996-1301 Netlib Development Group ************************************************************************** NHSE Progress Report, 2/17/95-3/12/95 Work at Syracuse (based on private communication from Ken Hawick on 3/11/95): NPAC folks have been working on extending the roadmap and on building a glossary/thesaurus system based on an Oracle database. The new system is in prototype phase, and I'll leave it up to Ken as to when to make the URL available to the NHSE list. Work at UT: The NHSE Software Catalog has been prettied up and is now linked to from the NHSE home page under Software/Enabling Technologies. The catalog is not yet automatically updatable from the individual catalog records we have been generating, and the PostScript version still needs to be cleaned up. The NHSE User Profile Submission Form is now functional and is linked to from the NHSE home page (it's near the bottom). [Noone except Tim Madden and myself has used it yet, however -- S. Browne] The purpose of this form is to collect user software and information needs from which to design and evaluate search/browse interfaces to the NHSE. A paragraph at the end of the upcoming IEEE CS&E article on the NHSE asks users to fill out this form. An NHSE liability disclaimer has been written and is accessible at http://www.netlib.org/nse/disclaimer.html. Please send comments on this page and on how we ought to link it in to browne@cs.utk.edu. The NHSE software submission forms at http://www.netlib.org/nse/software_submit have been revised. (software_submit.html is the top form, lifn_change.html will be output by the CGI program that is invoked from submit_change.html). An optional copyright field has been added. Authentication mechanisms have also been added to the software_submit.html and lifn_change.html. We have started implementing the CGI programs to make the forms functional. Please send comments on these forms to browne@cs.utk.edu. We installed Harvest 1.1 which is supposed to be faster, take less disk space, and have bug fixes compared to Harvest 1.0. However, the 1.1 gatherer crashed after expanding 483 out of 1640 RootNodes, For those 483, it retrieved 1795 files but reported over 300 errors for connections. I tried a few of these connections by hand and had no trouble (e.g., ftp://suif.stanford.edu/ and ftp://warp.cs.cmu.edu:/afs/cs/project/quake/public/www/quake.html). [I haven't had a chance to investigate the cause of the failures yet. My patience with Harvest is starting to grow thin. -- S. Browne] Three of us (Shirley Browne, Keith Moore, and Reed Wade) met March 6 with Bill Arms at CNRI. There seems to be some common ground between CNRI's digital library projects and the URN/LIFN/BFD work we are doing as part of the NHSE, as well as interest in cooperating and possibly merging our efforts. More information about CNRI and the digital library projects may be found at http://www.cnri.reston.va.us. Shirley Browne attended the March 7-8 RIG (Reuse library Interoperability Group) meeting in Arlington, Va. Netlib was officially voted in as a RIG member, and Netlib will be representing NHSE's interests as well. The RIG has been chartered by IEEE to develop standard for interoperable reuse libraries. The RIG has technical committees working on data models and meta-models, system architecture, and a common asset evaluation and certification framework. The RIG is interested in accommodating Netlib and the NHSE and in having us interoperate with their other reuse libraries (ASSET, CARDS, ELSA, AdaIC, STARS, DSRS, plus some industry libraries). They have implemented one interoperability experiment using a private client/server protocol over TCP, and they are currently implementing a second interoperability experiment using CORBA technology.