Information Retrieval List Digest 477 (November 1, 1999) URL = http://hegel.lib.ncsu.edu/stacks/serials/irld/irld-477.txt IRLIST Digest ISSN 1064-6965 November 1, 1999 Volume XVI, Number 41 Issue 477 ****************************************************************** II. JOBS 1. ISTG: Professor: Computer Science III. NOTICES A. Publications 1. Journal: Information Agents: Theory & Applications: Final CFPapers B. Meetings 1. IRSG 2000: CFPapers 2. RIAO 2000: Final Conference Reminder 3. 5th Intl. Conference on Fuzzy Sets Theory & Its Applications: Special Session on Fuzzy Querying 4. 2nd Intl. Workshop: Natural Language & Information Systems: CFPapers IV. PROJECTS D. Miscellaneous 1. Social and Economic Implications of IT: Bibliographic Pilot 2. Report from Santa Fe E-print Archiving Meeting ****************************************************************** II. JOBS II.1. Fr: Yves Chiaramella =20 Re: ISTG: Professor: Computer Science=20 Universite Joseph Fourier - Grenoble (France) ( http://www.ujf-grenoble.fr/english/welcome.html ) Institut des Sciences et Techniques de Grenoble ( http://www-istg.ujf-grenoble.fr/istgWeb/principal.htm ) A position of full professor in Computer Science will be created in January 2000 by the University and affected to the "Institut des Sciences et Techniques de Grenoble" (ISTG). Applications are sought from senior researchers involved in the domain of Information Retrieval (IR), with a specific interest for multimedia IR, advanced models for IR, and interactive IR. The research activity will integrated to the CLIPS-IMAG laboratory (http://www-clips.imag.fr/), a laboratory dedicated to man-machine communication (including natural= language processing, engineering of interactive systems, multimedia information retrieval). Informal enquiries may be made to Prof. Y. Chiaramella (chiara@imag.fr, tel= : (33) 4 76 51 46 02) IMPORTANT : - being a government (i.e., permanent) position, applications must conform to a specific procedure starting soon with the registration to the "liste de qualification" (a nation wide procedure for preselecting candidates).=20 THIS IS A FIRST MANDATORY STEP which may be simply done in filling an electronic document found at the government website before NOVEMBER 10,= 1999: http://antares.adc.education.fr/antares/ - Note that for Computer Science the reference administrative section is the 27th (this info may be asked further in the application procedure) - candidates must be fluent in spoken French language Yves Chiaramella=20 Laboratoire CLIPS-IMAG Tel: +33.=20 (0)4 76 51 46 02=20 BP.53=20 Fax: +33 (0)4 76 44 66 75=20 38041 Grenoble Cedex 9 e-mail:=20 chiara@imag.fr=20 http://clips.imag.fr/=20 ****************************************************************** III. NOTICES III.A.1. Fr: Matthias Klusch =20 Re: Journal: Information Agents: Theory & Applications: Final CFPapers=20 FINAL CALL FOR PAPERS Special Double Issue of the International Journal on=20 Cooperative Information Systems INTELLIGENT INFORMATION AGENTS: THEORY AND APPLICATIONS Guest Editor: Matthias Klusch=20 Deduction and Multi-Agent Systems Lab=20 German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence Ltd., Germany http://www.dfki.de/~klusch/JCISspecial.html IMPORTANT DATES=20 - Submission of Manuscripts: NOVEMBER 25, 1999 - Notification of Acceptance: MARCH 30, 2000 - Publication of Special Issue due to: Fall 2000 SCOPE & TOPICS=20 This special double issue of the International Journal on Cooperative Information Systems is devoted to advances in theory and applications of intelligent information agents. Roughly speaking, an information agent is a computational software entity that has access to one or multiple, heterogeneous and geographically distributed information sources; it pro-actively searches for and maintains relevant information on behalf of users or other agents preferably in a just-in-time fashion. Such an agent is supposed to satisfy= one or multiple of following requirements: * Information acquisition and management, i.e., it may monitor, update, and provide transparent access to one or many different information=20 sources, retrieve, extract, analyze and filter data (including semi- structured or even unstructured data).=20 * Information synthesis and presentation, that is, it is able to integrate heterogeneous data and to provide unified (and multi- dimensional) views on data.=20 * Intelligent user assistance by being able, for example to dynamically adapt to user preferences, any kind of changes in information and network environment. =20 It may provide convenient individual interactive assistance for everyday business on the Internet such as a life-like character, recommend sources= and future work steps, etc. In other words, the agent helps to manage and= overcome the difficulties associated with information overload. In part, there are= many approaches and implemented solutions available from advanced databases, knowledge-bases and distributed information systems technology to meet some= of these demands. The effective and efficient access to information on the Internet and Web has become a critical research area. Information agents technology emerged as part of the more general= intelligent software agent technology around seven years ago mainly as a response to the increasing challenges of the cyberspace from both, the technological and= human user perspective. It is an inherently interdisciplinary technology encompassing approaches, methods and tools from different research disciplines such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), Advanced Database and Knowledge Base Systems, Distributed Information Systems, Information Retrieval, Cognitive Sciences= and Human Computer Interaction (HCI). Today, it can be seen as one of the key technologies for the actual and future Internet and worldwide Web. Topics are but not limited to: * Architectures of (Systems of) Information Agents -General and specific architectures of information agents in different settings and environments.=20 -Approaches for communication and collaboration between (systems) of information agents. -Service matchmaking and brokering. -Inter-Agent Communication languages. * Advanced Database and Knowledge-Base Technology -Interoperability in large-scaled, and uncertain information environments.=20 -Application of Techniques for Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery in open, distributed and dynamically changing environments. * Methods of Adaptation and Learning for Systems of Information Agents -Methods for automated uncertain reasoning for information agents.=20 -Computation and action under uncertainty and limited resources.=20 -Performance and measurement of adaptation of single agent or multiagent systems in uncertain information environments. * Mobility and Issues of Security in the Internet -Architectures, Environments and Languages for Mobile and Secure=20 -Information Agents and Servers.=20 -Secure agent execution and protection of data servers from malicious agents.=20 -Cooperating Information Agents in wearable computers, hand-held and/or satellite-based control devices. * Rational Information Agents and Electronic Commerce -Agent-Based Marketplaces, Coalition Formation, Auctions, Negotiations.=20 -Economic models of cooperative problem solving among rational information agents in open information environments.=20 -Methods for prevention and detection of lying rational information agents.=20 -Electronic Commerce with incomplete and uncertain informations.=20 -Standards for privacy of communication, security, and jurisdiction for agent-mediated deals. * Human-Agent Interaction -Synthetic Agents, believable avatars, and 3-D multimedia-based representation of user information spaces in the Internet.=20 -Models and Implementation of Advanced Interfaces for conversation and dialogue among Information Agents and Users. * Systems and Applications -Systems and Applications of multiple collaborating Information Agents on the Internet. PREPARATION OF MANUSCRIPT=20 The length of the contribution should not exceed 22 pages. For guidelines on manuscript preparation please check the relevant last 5 pages in any issue= of the journal, and check the Web site of the International Journal on Cooperative Information Systems at: http://www.wspc.com.sg/journals/ijcis/ijcis.html SUBMISSION=20 Manuscripts are to be submitted by (electronic) mail to the Guest Editor= (see below). Authors may suggest the appropriate persons to review/referee their paper, however, the Editor need not necessarily take up the suggestion. Authors may request that their identity be kept unknown to the referee. Camera-ready manuscripts are to be prepared according to the instructions provided in any issue of the journal, preferably using LATEX or TEX. Please submit your manuscript by E-Mail (printable POSTSCRIPT - A4 format- AND the original= text file) to klusch@dfki.de OR Mail (5 Hard Copies) to Matthias Klusch=20 DFKI GmbH=20 Stuhlsatzenhausweg 3=20 66123 Saarbruecken, Germany. Dr. Matthias Klusch=20 DFKI German AI Research Center Ltd.=20 Stuhlsatzenhausweg 3=20 66123 Saarbruecken, Germany=20 Phone: +49-681-302 5297=20 Fax: +49-681-302 2235=20 http://www.dfki.de/~klusch/=20 ********** III.B.1. Fr: Ayse S Goker-Arslan =20 Re: IRSG 2000: CFPapers IRSG2000 2nd Annual Colloquium on IR Research (BCS-IRSG, CEPIS) 5-7 April, 1999 Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge CALL FOR PAPERS This annual colloquium on information retrieval research provides an opportunity for both new and established researchers to present papers describing work in progress or final results.=20 Topics of interest include (but are not limited to):=20 *Evaluation and testing of information retrieval systems=20 *Information retrieval and the Web=20 *Hypermedia/Multimedia indexing and retrieval=20 *Information retrieval from non-text media (including spoken document, image/video retrieval)=20 *Voice processing and retrieval=20 *Logic and information retrieval=20 *User interfaces for information retrieval=20 *User interaction in information retrieval=20 *Information retrieval in library systems=20 *Networked information retrieval=20 *Database and information retrieval integration=20 *Data mining and information extraction=20 *Natural language processing for information retrieval=20 *Knowledge-based information retrieval=20 *Intelligent information retrieval=20 *Commercial applications of information retrieval systems=20 SUBMISSIONS=20 Authors are required to submit their paper, in English, by 10 December 1999.= =20 Papers should contain at most 7500 words and be double-spaced. The abstract should not exceed 100 words.=20 Final papers will be required in the Electronic Workshops in Computing= format (http://www.ewic.org.uk/ewic/). Authors are encouraged to submit papers in this format.=20 The submission should include two PostScript copies of the paper: one full copy and one anonymous. Both files should be submitted by anonymous ftp to ftp.scms.rgu.ac.uk under the /pub/incoming/irsg2000 directory. The file= names should reflect the title of the paper but the anonymous copy should have the prefix "anon". (To protect author privacy it will not be possible to list files in this directory).=20 For the anonymous copy, the first page must contain the title of the paper= and abstract, but no indication about the author(s) and affiliation(s).=20 In addition, authors must send an email message to irsg2000@scms.rgu.ac.uk containing the title of the paper, the name of the file that has been submitted, the author name(s), and the author affiliation(s), plus complete contact information (mailing address, telephone, fax and e-mail) for the author to whom correspondence should be sent.=20 Any queries regarding submission should be sent to: asga@scms.rgu.ac.uk=20 FURTHER DETAILS=20 For further details regarding travel, programme of events etc. see=20 http://www.soi.city.ac.uk/~andym/colloq2000/cfp.html IMPORTANT DATES Paper submission: 10 December 1999.=20 Notification of acceptance: 10 February 2000.=20 Final copy due: 10 March 2000. PUBLICATION All papers will be refereed. Following notification of acceptance, authors= of selected papers will have until 10 March 2000 to make revisions in the light of referees' comments. Papers will be published in the draft proceedings which will be circulated to all delegates during the Colloquium. Final papers will be published in the Electronic Workshops in Computing=20 (Springer-Verlag) http://www.ewic.org.uk/ewic/.=20 CONTACTS=20 If you have any queries or problems concerning submitting a paper, please contact:=20 Dr. Ayse G=F6ker=20 School of Computer and Mathematical Sciences=20 The Robert Gordon University=20 St. Andrew Street=20 Aberdeen AB25 1HG=20 Scotland, UK=20 Tel: +44 (0) 1224-262713=20 Fax: +44 (0) 1224-262727=20 Email: asga@scms.rgu.ac.uk ********** III.B.2. Fr: Jeff Allen =20 Re: RIAO 2000: Final Conference Reminder =20 =20 Final conference reminder for RIAO 2000. Please note the 8 November paper submission deadline and the extended deadline until 17 November for= Innovative Applications demos. LAST CALL FOR PAPERS & APPLICATION DEMONSTRATIONS RIAO 2000: Content-Based Multimedia Information Access College de France Paris, France April 12-14, 2000 Web site: http://host.limsi.fr/RIAO Organized by: C.I.D.(France) & C.A.S.I.S. (USA) With the collaboration of AII, ASIS, ELRA, Elsnet, ESCA, Francil=20 (preliminary list) INTRODUCTION The conference scope will range from the traditional processing of text documents to the rapidly growing field of automatic indexing and retrieval= of images and speech and, more generally, to all processing of audio-visual and multimedia information on various distribution venues, including the Net.= The conference is of interest for several scientific communities, including Information Retrieval, Natural Language Processing, Spoken Language Processing, Computer Vision, Human-Computer Interaction and Digital Libraries. RIAO 2000 will, thereby, serve as a forum for cross-discipline initiatives and innovative applications.=20 RIAO 2000 will present recent scientific progress, demonstrations of prototypes resulting from this research as well as the most innovative products now appearing on the market. A worldwide Call for Papers is addressed to researchers engaged in academic or industrial research. The associated Call for Applications is addressed to companies and public organizations developing= or marketing hardware or software related to the conference topics. The RIAO (Computer-Assisted Information Retrieval) International Conference= is held every 3 years. Sites for the conference have been Grenoble (1985),= Boston (1988), Barcelona (1991), New York (1994) and Montreal (1997). RIAO 2000 Conference Topics: A. Document processing:=20 A.1. Hypertextual and Hypermedia documents=20 A.2. Human-Computer Interaction for document handling=20 A.3. Textual and voice-based annotation creation and retrieval=20 A.4. Digital libraries=20 A.5. AI techniques for document generation and consultation=20 A.6. Multimodal and transmodal human-machine communication=20 B. Information Retrieval:=20 B.1. Information retrieval systems and methods=20 B.2. Document search over the internet, Text Mining=20 B.3. Information and document routing/profiling/alerting=20 B.4. Document classification C. Spoken Language Processing:=20 C.1. Voice-based document segmentation and transcription=20 C.2. Voice-based document indexing and retrieval=20 C.3. Identification of language of speaker=20 C.4. Speaker recognition, Audio Mining=20 C.5. Non-verbal sound processing (music, noise...) D. Natural Language Processing:=20 D.1. Information extraction=20 D.2. NLP techniques for document processing=20 D.3. Terminology extraction and analysis=20 D.4. Automatic thesaurus construction=20 D.5. Multilingual and crosslingual document handling=20 D.6. Machine translation of documents=20 D.7. Automatic summarization=20 D.8. Identification of language of text E. Image processing:=20 E.1. Automatic indexing and retrieval of visual documents=20 E.2. Computer graphics for document generation and consultation=20 E.3. Segmentation and indexing of visual data=20 E.4. Face, gaze and expression recognition=20 E.5. Character recognition in visual documents=20 E.6. Image Mining, Video indexing and retrieval F. System architecture:=20 F.1. Multi-agent architecture, search agents=20 F.2. Intelligent agents, Androids and Avatars=20 G. Usage and best practice:=20 G.1. Socio-economics of information retrieval=20 G.2. Quantitative, qualitative and comparative evaluation=20 G.3. Coding standards and Quality of Services, Security and privacy=20 G.4. Cognitive aspects, Human Factors and Ergonomics=20 G.5. Legal aspects of multimedia document handling=20 G.6. Multimedia and multimodal resources H. Applications:=20 H.1. Computer-aided information access for the handicapped=20 H.2. Multimedia systems for medical applications=20 H.3. Image Guided Surgery and Augmented Reality=20 H.4. Medical documents archiving and retrieval=20 H.5. Transmodal information access systems=20 H.6. Telephone-based, nomad and in-vehicle systems=20 H.7. Intelligent systems for call-center reporting=20 H.8. Customized customer support (Aerospace product manuals...)=20 H.9. Strategic and technology watch & Business Intelligence=20 H.10. Real-Time information access for financial markets=20 H.11. Information access for decision aid systems=20 H.12. Multimodal Geographical Information Systems=20 H.13. Television and Radio Broadcast Archiving and Browsing...=20 CALL FOR PAPERS The Scientific Program will include invited talks, presentations of accepted papers in oral and poster sessions and panel sessions. There will be= parallel sessions, devoted to a given research field, and plenary sessions,= presenting topics of interest for all participants. The mode of presentation (oral= versus poster) will be based on the appropriateness of the paper to that mode of communication, not on the quality of the paper. Authors are invited to submit short or long papers on the conference topics. The papers will be reviewed by the International Scientific Committee, and selected on the basis of their scientific and technological quality, their innovative content and their relevance to the topic of the conference. Interested parties are invited to submit their paper to the following address:=20 riao2000@limsi.fr=20 Subject: Paper Submission Electronic submissions will be acknowledged within 48 hours. If they are not acknowledged, please check the Email address and resubmit. See the RIAO 2000= =20 Web site for all information relevant to submission procedures and formats, the members of the Program Committee, etc. CALENDAR: * Submission deadline: ***November 8, 1999***=20 * Notification of acceptance: December 15, 1999=20 * Submission of complete papers: January 15, 2000=20 * Final Program: January 25, 2000=20 * Conference: April 12-14, 2000=20 CALL FOR INNOVATIVE APPLICATIONS In addition to scientific presentations and scientific demonstrations,=20 Innovative Industrial Applications treating the Conference themes will be selected by the Applications Committee. Selected applications will be given on-site demonstration space for the duration of the RIAO'2000 Conference (three days). They will also be awarded a RIAO-branded icon for their web pages displaying "Selected as Innovative Application at RIAO'2000". A time will be set aside during the Conference for a "deal-making" session in which industrial partners can make contacts with research partners. Interested parties are invited to submit a short description of their product to the following address:=20 riao2000@limsi.fr=20 Subject: Application Submission Please give your=20 -- product name=20 -- a succinct description of its innovative characteristics=20 -- the RIAO theme(s) that the application addresses You will be given by return e-mail an application number and instructions of where to find the complete online submission application. See the RIAO 2000 Web site for all information relevant to submission procedures and formats, the members of the Application Committee, etc. CALENDAR (***Caution: Extended Deadlines***): * First Application Deadline: ***November 17, 1999***=20 * Notification of Acceptance: December 18, 1999=20 * Conference: April 12-14, 2000=20 CONTACTS: RIAO2000 Email: riao2000@limsi.fr RIAO 2000 Web site: http://host.limsi.fr/RIAO Jeff ALLEN - Technical Manager/Directeur Technique=20 European Language Resources Association (ELRA) &=20 European Language resources - Distribution Agency (ELDA)=20 (Agence Europe'enne de Distribution des Ressources Linguistiques)=20 55, rue Brillat-Savarin=20 75013 Paris FRANCE=20 Tel: (+33) 1.43.13.33.33 - Fax: (+33) 1.43.13.33.30=20 mailto:jeff@elda.fr=20 http://www.icp.grenet.fr/ELRA/home.html ********** III.B.3. Fr: Slawomir Zadrozny =20 Re: 5th Intl. Conference on Fuzzy Sets Theory & Its Applications: Special Session on Fuzzy Querying=20 Fifth International Conference on Fuzzy Sets Theory and Its Applications January 30 -February4, 2000 Liptovsk=FD Mikul=E1=9A The Slovak Republic Special Session/Workshop on FUZZY QUERYING Call for abstract and participation Fuzzy querying turns out to be one of the most promising areas of fuzzy sets theory and fuzzy logic theory application. So far, most popular lines of research include fuzzy querying of (conventional) databases and the use of fuzzy concepts in information retrieval. Due to a rapidly growing amount of information collected in companies, public administration, private= resources, etc., querying becomes a daily activity of more and more people. These information resources contain neither strictly well-structured data (best suited to be dealt with using databases) nor, on the other extreme, almost unstructured bodies of text. The Internet, a global container of= information, with its plethora of semi- structured documents is here a good example. Multimedia and HTML files, e-mail message boxes etc. pose a challenge for efficient querying techniques. Moreover, the source of querying criteria and the ultimate user of the querying results is a human being. Thus, it seems= to be a vital imperative to provide for human consistency of the querying techniques. In practical terms, it refers to the use of natural language= based concepts in querying. In the simplest setting, it may consist in the maintenance of a dictionary of well-defined terms and operations to be used= in a query language. Then, often it would be advantageous if the results of a query were described using the very same set of linguistic terms. That opens the door for the application of several relevant techniques like data mining and summarisation, linguistic approximation, etc. In fact, putting the whole topic in a broader perspective we can consider a kind of natural language based data processing or computing with words postulated recently by Lotfi Zadeh. The Fifth International Conference on Fuzzy Sets Theory and Its Applications (FSTA) seems to be a very convenient forum for an open discussion of the subject of fuzzy querying, roughly depicted above. The conference,= recognised by EUSFLAT as the very first "fuzzy event" of the new millennium, precedes some other similar events including FQAS=922000 (Flexible Query Answering= Systems) conference in Warsaw, Poland (October 2000), Special Session on Intelligent Techniques for Internet Resources at Fourth International Conference on Knowledge-Based Intelligent Engineering Systems & Allied Technologies in Brighton, UK (August/September 2000) or special session on database and information retrieval systems at IFSA Congress/ NAFIPS, in Vancouver, Canada (July 2001), to quote just a few. The special session at FSTA is conceived as a less formal forum for the exchange of ideas relevant for the concept of fuzzy querying, including, but not limited to, the following topics (practical implementations and experiences as well as theoretical advances): =B7 Fuzzy querying languages=20 =B7 Fuzzy relational algebra=20 =B7 Use of fuzzy concepts in information retrieval=20 =B7 Linguistic data mining techniques=20 =B7 Fuzzy approaches for dealing with various data formats, as, e.g., multimedia, HTML, XML A short abstract (of about 300 words) of the proposed contribution is to be sent by e-mail to organizers of this workshop Slawomir Zadrozny (e-mail: zadrozny@ibspan.waw.pl) and Peter Vojtas (e-mail: vojtas@kosice.upjs.sk) by November 30, 1999 . Proceedings with selected papers will be published after the conference. More information on FSTA (including registration form) please find at the following address http://www.ibspan.waw.pl/konf/fsta.txt Slawomir Zadrozny Systems Research Institute phone: +48 22 364103=20 Polish Academy of Sciences fax: +48 22 372772 01-447 Warszawa=20 ul. Newelska 6=20 POLAND ********** III.B.4. Fr: Werner Winiwarter =20 Re: 2nd Intl. Workshop: Natural Language & Information Systems: CFPapers=20 Call for Papers 2nd International Workshop on Natural Language and Information Systems NLIS 2000 http://www.ifs.univie.ac.at/~ww/nlis2000.html in conjunction with the 11th International Conference on Database and Expert Systems Applications DEXA 2000 Greenwich, United Kingdom September 4-8, 2000 Workshop proceedings to be published by IEEE Computer Society Press THEME The Second International Workshop on Natural Language and Information= Systems will take place on the eve of a new millenium which will bring unimaginable changes and new challenges. Human Language Technology (HLT) has reached a level of maturity that makes it feasible to solve many of the urgent needs of the coming information age. By learning from past failures and successes we are now ready to apply the new technology to real-life applications.= Multilinguality, mobile speech access to the web, and automatic knowledge extraction from documents are just a few examples that show the importance of HLT as a key technology for the new millenium. The main objective of this workshop is to bring together researchers from= both natural language processing and information systems with the aim of encouraging the exchange of ideas and experience between these two communities. It will provide an international forum for the presentation of an overview of the= most recent trends in these two active research fields, and a common= starting-point to tackle the most acute problems of information processing. Topics of interest include but are not limited to: * Natural language interfaces=20 * Multimodal interfaces=20 * Adaptive interfaces=20 * HLT for information system design=20 * HLT for conceptual modeling=20 * HLT for requirements engineering=20 * HLT for information retrieval and filtering=20 * HLT for the WWW=20 * Terminology and ontologies=20 * Lexical resources and corpora=20 * Multilinguality=20 * Computer-assisted language learning=20 * Machine translation=20 * Word sense disambiguation=20 * Document categorization=20 * Information extraction=20 * Text summarization=20 * Natural language learning=20 * Natural language generation=20 * Evaluation of natural language systems IMPORTANT DATES * Submission deadline: 24 January 2000=20 * Notification of acceptance: 10 April 2000=20 * Camera-ready copies: 1 May 2000 SUBMISSION DETAILS Authors are invited to submit research contributions representing original, previously unpublished work. Submitted papers will be carefully evaluated based on originality, significance, technical soundness, and clarity of= exposition. All papers will be refereed by at least two members of the program= committee. Accepted papers will be published by IEEE Computer Society Press as proceedings of the DEXA 2000 workshops. All submitted papers MUST be formatted according to the author guidelines provided by IEEE Computer Society Press and MUST NOT= be longer than FIVE pages. The author guidelines can be found at http://www.ifs.univie.ac.at/~ww/format.html. If you use LaTeX, an example document can be found at http://www.ifs.univie.ac.at/~ww/nlis.tex and the corresponding output at=20 http://www.ifs.univie.ac.at/~ww/nlis.ps. Electronic Submission Please submit your paper electronically to our FTP site. Please prepare your paper as plain ASCII PostScript only, with NO encoding, condensing, or encapsulation. Please use TrueType 1 fonts wherever possible. Do not use bitmapped fonts such as Computer Modern if you can avoid it. Guidelines for generating and submitting PostScript files are available from http://computer.org/author/psguide.htm. File Naming Conventions for Electronic Submissions Please save your file using your name, i.e. John Smith's file would be john_smith.ps. If you are submitting two or more files, please number them: john_smith1.ps, john_smith2.ps, etc. Transferring Files to the FTP Site When transferring files to the FTP site, if you have a choice between=20 ASCII and binary modes, use binary. Although ASCII mode works well most of= the time, binary mode incurs fewer problems. Our FTP site: ftp.ifs.univie.ac.at=20 Log on as: anonymous=20 Place files in subdirectory: incoming/nlis2000 Notification When you have put your file(s) in the FTP subdirectory, please send an email to winiwarter@acm.org with the following information: Your name, phone, fax,= URL (your Web address, if you have one), your email address, the title of your paper, and the filename(s) you used. (Do NOT send a copy of your postscript file via email.) Hard Copy Paper Submissions If, for some reason, you cannot place an electronic copy of your paper on= our ftp site, ONLY THEN you may submit it as four hard copies to the following address: Prof. Werner Winiwarter=20 Institute of Applied Computer Science & Information Systems=20 University of Vienna=20 Liebiggasse 4/3=20 A-1010 Wien=20 AUSTRIA Electronic Abstracts Please send also an electronic copy of your abstract, in ASCII format and including the paper title, keywords, author names, addresses, and affiliations, to winiwarter@acm.org. WORKSHOP CHAIRS * Werner Winiwarter, University of Vienna, Austria=20 * Robert Dale, Language Technology Pty Ltd and Macquarie University, Australia=20 * Tsunenori Mine, Kyushu University, Japan For any further questions or inquiries please contact: Prof. Werner Winiwarter=20 Institute of Applied Computer Science & Information Systems=20 University of Vienna=20 Liebiggasse 4/3, A-1010 Wien, AUSTRIA=20 Email: winiwarter@acm.org=20 Phone: +43-1-4277-38434=20 Fax: +43-1-4277-38449 ****************************************************************** IV. PROJECTS IV.D.1. Fr: Eileen Collins, Eileen =20 Re: Social and Economic Implications of IT: Bibliographic Pilot=20 The "Social and Economic Implications of Information Technologies=20 Bibliographic Data Base" is a pilot project. We invite you and your= colleagues to visit the pilot site =20 Re: Report from Santa Fe E-print Archiving Meeting=20 Recently, I attended and helped to facilitate a meeting to discuss interoperability among pre-print and e-print archives in Santa Fe. Those who are operating or planning to build either institutional or disciplinary archive servers of this type will, I think, find the report below of great interest and will want to track further developments from this initiative. Clifford Lynch=20 Director, Coalition for Networked Information First meeting of the Universal Preprint Service Initiative UPS Initiative: Paul Ginsparg, Rick Luce, Herbert Van de Sompel=20 Meeting: * Location: Santa Fe, New Mexcio, US, October 21-22, 1999=20 * Sponsors: Council on Library and Information Resources, the Digital Library Federation, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, Association of Research Libraries, the Research Library of the Los Alamos National Laboratory.=20 * Meeting moderators: Clifford Lynch & Don Waters.=20 * Represented institutions/organizations: American Physical Society, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Association of Research Libraries, California Institute of Technology, Coalition for Networked Information, Cornell University, Council on Library and Information Resources, Digital Library Federation, Harvard University, HighWire Press, Library of Congress, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, NASA Langley, Old Dominion University, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, University of California, University of Ghent, University of Southampton, University of Surrey, Vanderbilt University, Virginia Tech and Washington University.=20 * Represented eprint-initiatives: arXiv.org (=3Dxxx), CogPrints, NDLTD, RePEc, EconWPA, NCSTRL, NTRS=20 * Participants: see separate list Executive Summary The Universal Preprint Service initiative has been set up to create a forum= to discuss and solve matters of interoperability between author self-archiving solutions, as a way to promote their global acceptance (see http://vole.lanl.gov/ups/ups.htm ). The first, largest and most important such archive is the Los Alamos= National Laboratory (LANL) Physics Archive. Founded by Paul Ginsparg in 1991, LANL= now houses over 100,000 papers, mirrored worldwide in 15 countries with over 50,000 users daily and still growing (see http://arXiv.org/cgi-bin/show_stats/ ). Other disciplines and institutions have begun to create public research archives along the lines of LANL, but what is needed are conventions that archives could adopt to ensure that they work together so that any paper in any of these archives could be found from anyone's desktop worldwide, as if it were all= in one virtual public library. The participants in the meeting were digital librarians and computer scientists specializing in archiving, metadata, and interoperability, and they included the founders of the principal public research archives that exist so far.= The participants were diverse in their underlying motivations, but entirely unified in their objective of paving the way for universal public archiving of the scientific and scholarly research literature on the Web. The group agreed on minimal technical requirements for archives. These will= be published seperately as the "Santa Fe Conventions" and, in the next six=20 months, will be implemented in the existing archives. Technical Summary The first meeting concentrated on the creation of cross-archive end-user services. The aim was to try and identify general architectural and= technical characteristics of archive solutions that would facilitate the creation of such services. These characteristics could then be used as recommendations for existing and upcoming initiatives. The meeting started off with a presentation and demonstration by a team consisting of Herbert Van de Sompel (University of Ghent and Los Alamos National Laboratory), Michael Nelson (NASA Langley and Old Dominion University) and Thomas Krichel (University of Surrey and RePEc initiative). This group= had built an experimental end-user service providing access to data originating from main archive initiatives (arXiv, RePEc, NCSTRL, NDLTD, NTRS). A variety of technologies were used in the project, including NCSTRL+ as the digital library service, intelligent objects called buckets as a means to store the archive metadata and the SFX linking solution as a means to interlink the eprint= data with the traditional scholarly communication mechanism. The presentation identified problems that arose during the project, and discussion of those served to launch the UPS meeting. This presentation was followed by position papers on interoperability issues presented by Carl Lagoze (Cornell University), Kurt Maly (Old Dominion University), Ed Fox (Virginia Tech) and Carolyne Arms (Library of Congress). Following the initial presentations, there was a panel discussion in which Paul Ginsparg (Los Alamos National Laboratory), Paul Gherman (Vanderbilt University), Eric Van de Velde (CalTech) and John Ober (University of California) expressed their opinion on the possible pros and cons of institutional versus discipline-oriented archive initiatives. The UPS group concluded that many different archive initiatives were likely to emerge,= with different conceptual, organizational and technical foundations. In order for such initiatives to successfully become part of the scholarly communication system, interoperability was seen as a crucial factor. The UPS group agreed that interoperability hinges on a fundamental= distinction between the archive-functions, which include data-collection and maintenance and end-user functions, like the cross-system search and linking prototype service described in the opening session. Although archive initiatives can implement their own end-user services, it is essential that the archives remain "open" in order to allow others to equally create such services. This= concept was formalized in the distinction between providers of data (the archive initiatives) and implementers of data services (the initiatives that want to create end-user services for archive initiatives). Stimulated by a presentation by Thomas Krichel, the UPS group agreed that an essential feature of the= Santa Fe Conventions would be that providers of data use a standard mechanism to state the conditions under which their datasets can be used by implementers= of data services. Similarly, the implementers of data services could describe= the use they make of archive data. This organizational argument was followed by a discussion on the technicalities of creating end-user services for data originating from different archives. The group recognized that there are basically two ways to implement these: a distributed searching approach and a harvesting approach. The former would require archives to implement a joint distributed search protocol, which is not considered to be a low-entry requirement. Moreover, the technical experts recognized that there are important problems of scale when implementing such distributed search solutions, in light of the possible emergence of= thousands of institutional and/or subject-oriented archives worldwide. As such, the group decided this was not a realistic approach at this point in time. Therefore,= as in the experimental project presented at the beginning of the meeting, a harvesting solution was proposed. Such a harvesting solution would allow trusted parties - the ones that subscribe to the Santa Fe Conventions - to selectively collect data from different archives. It was identified that such a technique requires an understanding regarding: * Protocols to selectively harvest data;=20 * Criteria that can be used to selectively harvest data;=20 * Metadata formats that are used by archive solutions to respond to harvesting requests. It was recognized that providers of data could describe the details of these interfaces in standard ways thus enabling implementers of data to create archive-specific harvesters. Still, the UPS group decided to go one step further and to highly recommend the following: * Protocols to selectively harvest data: implementation of part of the Dienst protocol in order to achieve a uniform way to poll an archive for its logical division(s) (subarchives) and to selectively harvest data from these divisions.=20 * Criteria that can be used to selectively harvest data: there should at least be support for a bulk harvest of all data from an archive, as well as a mechanism to harvest based on accession date. Other harvesting criteria that were thought to be important included author affiliation, subject, publication type.=20 * Metadata formats that are used by archive solutions to respond to harvesting requests: It is recognized that archives will use (an) internal metadata format(s) best suited to deal with the material to be described. Still, the UPS group decided to propose a minimal Dublin Core compliant metadata set, called the Santa Fe Set, which should be made available by all archives. It is desirable that archives are able to respond to harvesting requests with data delivered in both the internal metadata format as in the Santa Fe Set format. The representatives of existing archive initiatives at the meeting as well= as those from institutions that are in the process of setting up archive initiatives agreed to comply to those guidelines. The Dienst protocol will= be enhanced to allow for the functions mentioned above and a minimal Dienst release facilitating the process of making an archive compliant to the required aspects of Dienst will be made available. A transport format for MARC-formatted metadata will be proposed, as well as an XML DTD for the description of the Santa Fe Set. The recommendations will be extensively documented on a Web site. Adoption of the recommendations will be promoted worldwide. The way forward: * The minimal Dienst protocol set will be implemented for all archives that were represented at the meeting. This will allow for a first round of experimentation with the creation of end-user services=20 layered over existing archives.=20 * The group identified the urgent need to discuss the mechanisms used to submit material to archives.=20 * Paul Ginsparg suggested that a next meeting should be held in Europe, in the first quarter of next year.=20 * It was also thought to be important to have a presentation and/or workshop on the UPS Initiative at the ACM 2000 Conference on Digital=20 Libraries as well as at the European ECDLC.=20 * The experimental, non-productional prototype that was presented at the meeting will temporarily be available for exploration at the beginning of November 1999 at http://ups.cs.odu.edu/. The=20 representatives of Old Dominion University, the Research Library of the Los Alamos National Laboratory and the University of Ghent expressed their interest in continuing this prototyping work.=20 * The UPS Initiative will soon be given a new name and Web site. get in touch with the UPS initiative by contacting herbert.vandesompel@rug.ac.be ****************************************************************** IRLIST Digest is distributed from the University of California, California Digital Library, 1111 Franklin Street, Oakland, CA. 94607-5200. Send subscription requests and submissions to: nancy.gusack@ucop.edu Editorial Staff: Nancy Gusack nancy.gusack@ucop.edu Cliff Lynch (emeritus) cliff@cni.org The IRLIST Archives is set up for anonymous FTP. Using anonymous FTP via the host hibiscus.ucop.edu, the files will be found in the directory /data/ftp/pub/irl, stored in subdirectories by year (e.g., data/ftp/pub/irl/1993). Search or browse archived IR-L Digest issues on the Web at: http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/idom/irlist/ These files are not to be sold or used for commercial purposes. Contact= Nancy Gusack for more information on IRLIST. THE OPINIONS EXPRESSED IN IRLIST DO= NOT REPRESENT THOSE OF THE EDITORS OR THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA. AUTHORS= ASSUME FULL RESPONSIBILITY FOR THEIR MATERIAL.