08/09/94 RMIUG Meeting - Internet Information Discovery Tools

Our speaker for the August 9th Rocky Mountain Internet Users' Group is Dr. Michael Schwartz from the CU Computer Science Department. He will discuss “Harvest: A Scalable, Customizable Discovery and Access System” I.e. Mike will try to answer the question “what's out there on the Internet” and “how do I find it.” Mike is well known in Internet circles for his leading-edge (and sometimes controversial) research and is a dynamic speaker.

To quote from his intro:

Rapid growth in data volume, user base, and data diversity render it increasingly difficult to make effective use of Internet-accessible information. To address these problems, the Internet Research Task Force Research Group on Resource Discovery has developed a system called Harvest, which provides a set of customizable tools for gathering information from diverse repositories, building topic-specific content indexes, flexibly searching the indexes, widely replicating them, and caching objects as they are retrieved across the Internet. The system interoperates with Mosaic and with HTTP, FTP, and Gopher information resources, and demonstrates several significant advances for Internet resource discovery tools.

In this talk I will outline our goals and architecture, discuss the implemented system components, provide example uses of Harvest that highlight the strengths of our approach, and discuss work in progress to extend the system for use with more complex data objects.

Michael Schwartz is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Colorado - Boulder. He received his Ph.D in Computer Science from the University of Washington in 1987 (“Go Huskies!” Alek's undergrad is from UW ;-). His research focuses on international-scale networks and distributed systems. He has built and experimented with a dozen information systems, and chairs the Internet Research Task Force Research Group on Resource Discovery. Schwartz is on the editorial boards of IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking and of Internet Society News, and is a guest editor of IEEE Journal of Selected Areas in Communication for a Special Issue on the Global Internet. He has served on numerous program committees and panels, and has made recent presentations at meetings held by ACM, ARPA, ASIS, CAUSE, CNI, CRA, CSPP, EDUCOM, IDG, ISOC, Interop, NASA, NIST, NSF, OSF, USENIX, Westnet, and numerous universities and corporations.

The meeting is Tuesday, August 9th from 7:00 - 9:00 pm (with optional 6:30 pm start for informal networking and refreshments). The meeting will be held at NCAR -- National Center for Atmospheric Research -- in Boulder, which is located on the west end of Table Mesa Drive, up the hill, right under the Flatirons. Park in the NCAR lot, go in the main door, and ask the guard to point you to meeting, which is held in the auditorium. There is no cost for the meeting. Please RSVP to ac551@freenet.hsc.colorado.edu or phone 447-3475 if you plan on attending.

We will have Internet books that can be checked out of our virtual library. Thanks to RMIUG members Joe Betts and Bo (the Bohemian) for organizing the RMIUG library. Please return any books you borrowed last time.

RMIUG wishes to thank Internet One for providing refreshments (and shipping charges for the Net Pages handed out last month) and XOR Network Engineering for electronic “stuff.”

Consultants and companies are invited to bring Internet-related product information, brochures, and business cards which will be displayed on an information table.

There is close-in parking available at NCAR for the physically challenged. For detailed information about NCAR accessibility, please call NCAR at 429-3340 and talk to Facilities.

We hope to have a “Crypto-Fest” at our September 13th meeting (same “bat-time”, same “bat channel”) discussing Privacy, Encryption, PGP, Clipper Chip, etc.

There is an email mailing list set up for this group. General information can be obtained by sending an Email to rmiug@rmiug.org which will generate an auto-reply that tells you about the group and how to subscribe.