08/09/94
RMIUG Meeting Minutes - Michael Schwartz,
Harvest Information Discovery Tool
The seventh meeting of the Rocky Mountain Internet User's Group was August
9th, 1994. About 130 people were in attendance
(for one of our largest, perhaps the largest
meeting!). Alek Komarnitsky MC'ed the meeting,
which was notable not only for its large
audience, but even more for the fact that
nearly the entire audience stayed for the
full meeting.
Some general administrivia issues and
announcements of interest:
- Over half of the people in attendance
were at their first meeting. Dan passed
around a sign-up sheet; we currently have
about 400 people signed up on RMIUG's
Email list. Note that an Email to rmiug@rmiug.org
generates an auto-reply with info about
the RMIUG.
- Robert Skrobe (SkrobeRo@student.msu.edu)announced
the first meeting of the RMIUG Job Search
Action Group meeting, a special interest
subgroup of RMIUG, for Thursday, August
18th, at 7:00 p.m. in the Biblotek Book
Store. The purpose of this Action Group
is to enable Self-Directed Job Searching.
The Group will use various tools from
the networked world to generate Job Search
ideas, resources, contacts, leads and
opportunities for participants. Biblotek
is located on the northwest corner of
17th and Walnut, in the Basement level
of the Public Service Building. Anyone
planning on attending the meeting should
bring any available resources they know
of or currently use via the Internet for
job searching and career opportunities.
- Lloyd Brodsky (lbrodsky@rocksolid.com/phone:
758-7030) announced the formation of an
Internet Chamber of Commerce to involve
people doing business on the Internet.
The Internet Chamber had its first organizational
meeting on August 2 at the Ramada Inn
in Westminster and hopes to include professionals
primarily in the region from South Denver
to Boulder. Lloyd also announced the date
for a first meeting of an Internet Special
Interest Group (SIG) of the Windows on
the Rockies Users' Group. This group will
meet on the 4th Monday of every month
at 6:30pm in Denver. Call or Email Lloyd
for details.
- Dan Murray announced that he finished
the RMIUG "Nuggets" List of neat resources
on the Net. Members Emailed Dan an overwhelming
list of all kinds of resources. Dan waded
through the submissions to pull together
the file that now lives in FTPspace and
Webspace at rmiug.org.
- Caron Ellis, a reporter for the Boulder
County Business Report (Caron@usa.net/phone:
440-4950) mentioned that she wants to
talk to small to medium-size companies
hooking up to the Net for the first time
to gather information for an article she
will be writing for the Business Report.
- Pam Skaufel (Skaufel@csn.org)
from Colorado SuperNet announced a job
opening at CSN for an entry-level position
managing incoming telephone calls.
- Will Clurman (will@boulderpcs.com/phone:
440-0402) announced a logo contest for
RMIUG. Anyone who can come up with interesting
design concepts and can put them on disk
or paper should _leap_ at this opportunity
to contribute to the development of an
image for RMIUG.org. The logo will go
on press releases, business cards, T-shirts,
or anything else we might want to stick
it on.
Our featured speaker was Dr. Michael Schwartz,
Associate Professor of Computer Science at
the University of Colorado - Boulder. (Schwartz@cs.colorado.edu)
He discussed ``Harvest: A Scalable, Customizable
Discovery and Access System'' for the Internet.
Rapid growth in data volume, user base, and
data diversity renders 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. The talk was an
outline of Harvest's goals and architecture,
the implemented system components, and example
uses of Harvest highlighting the strengths
of the approach and work in progress to extend
the system for use with more complex data
objects. For more information on Harvest,
Email harvest-dvl@cs.colorado.edu or
Web to http://rd.cs.colorado.edu. The
Harvest team is looking for beta-test sites
to try out three distinct features of the
Harvest architecture. Version 1.0 will have
its general release "by the end of the Summer"
with "end of Summer" loosely defined as "not
too far into the coming school year ;-)
In addition to Harvest, Dr. Michael Scwartz
has published a number of tech reports on
other topics that may be of interest to
Internet fans. These can be found at ftp://ftp.cs.colorado.edu/pub/cs/techreports/schwartz/
and the file ftp://ftp.cs.colorado.edu/pub/cs/techreports/schwartz/0.README
contains a brief project overview and bibliography.
Many thanks to Dr. Schwartz for his presentation
and to Alek for his work in setting up this
meeting for the group.
The next RMIUG meeting is scheduled for
Tuesday, September 13th. We will have a
"Crypto-Fest" panel discussion organized
by RMIUG member Duane Thompson (ak351@freenet.hsc.colorado.edu),
including Phil DuBois, lawyer for Phil Zimmerman,
author of the encryption program Pretty
Good Privacy (PGP), Mike Johnson, encryption
expert, engineer, software programmer, inventor
of the Diamond encryption algorith, and
Phil Zimmerman himself, speaking to us about
encryption technology, the benefits and
uses of recent versions of PGP, and issues
surrounding encryption technology.
Suggestions/comments/feedback are always
welcome - pls Email these to rmiug-comm@rmiug.org
or call Dan Murray at 447-3475.
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