The%20Isaac%20Network

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The Isaac Network

• Susan Calcari
• Director, Internet Scout Project
• scout.cs.wisc.edu

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Internet Scout Project Surf
Smarter

• Scout Report
• Subject Specific Scout Reports
• Scout Report Signpost
• Net-happenings, Net-newsletters
• KIDS Report
• Scout Research The Isaac Network

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Todays Topics

• The Crete Meeting -- Cooperation between
  Subject Gateways, held at EDLC, Crete, September
  1998, organized by UK
• The View from the States
• The Isaac Network One contribution to the
  IMesh

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I. The Crete Meeting

• Inspired by UK discussions of the future of
  subject gateways, e.g. coverage, sustainability
• 2nd Annual European Digital Library Conference
  EDLC
• Informal meeting of 25 participants from 15
  countries

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Discussion

• Common questions worldwide
• Duplication and gaps in subject coverage
• Ongoing funding, self-sufficiency
• Interoperability and standards
• Need for guidelines for subject gateway
  development to facilitate cooperation

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Identified Common Needs

• Summary of existing gateways
• Best practice guidelines
• Definition(s) of quality resources
• Scope of content
• Interoperability and standards

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Result Workshops Series for development of
IMesh Guidelines

• Modeled on the success of the Dublin Core
  Workshop series
• Invited group 30-40 experts in related fields
• UK Spring 1999 CEI/JISC funded
• USA Fall 1999 NSF funded (proposed)

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II. Vision The View from the States

• The Amazing Internet Challenge How Leading
  Projects are Organizing the Internet
• Guide to 12 resource directories
• Mission, collection, staffing, timeline,
  software, hardware, budget, future, vision
• ALA Editions, Spring 1999

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The Amazing Internet Challenge
Higher Education BUBL EEVL OMNI SOSIG
AgNIC Argus Clearinghouse InfoMine Scout Report
Signpost
Public Libraries Internet Public Library
Librarians Index to the Internet K-12 Blue
WebN Undergraduate Education Math Archives
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Working Together

• Educators and librarians will continue to use a
  wide variety of sources special interest
  directories will play an important role
• Organized and presented by those expert in the
  systemization of knowledge
• Willingness to learn from success and failure of
  both ourselves and others

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Cooperate, Interoperate

• Cooperate to avoid duplication of effort on
  content
• Devise a division of responsibility
• Standardized content and quality guidelines
• Reasonably similar user interfaces
• Development of an information architecture

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Metadata (!)

• Consistent metadata standards
• Metadata applied by neutral, expert third parties
• Mapping of different metadata schemas across
  collections
• Standardized indexing schemes

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III. The Isaac Network Resource Discovery Goals

• Search highly selective collections of resources,
  hand-chosen by information specialists
• A single query will reach geographically
  distributed collections
• User doesnt need knowledge of all collections
• Ultimately the end user is judge of what is
  relevant and credible we can narrow the subset

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Content DevelopmentTop Down or Bottom Up?

• Funding Audience Funding
• Local projects, funding based on local needs,
  local audience
• Most chance for longevity projects are
  becoming part of operations
• Bonus As content providers they want to share
  their work more broadly

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Needs of Content Providers

• Content providers need to retain control
• Content, look and feel, maintenance of records
• Application of metadata
• Retain ownership and credit

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Goals of the Isaac Network

• Build an infrastructure for sharing and searching
  metadata from distributed metadata collections
• Test bed for experimentation with metadata,
  indexing, and query referral systems
• Develop collaborative laboratory for future
  research indexing algorithms, assisted robots

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Potential Content Partners

• While primary audience is higher education, all
  are welcome and encouraged to join
• Government, public libraries, non-profit,
  commercial
• May be focussed on a single discipline, or cover
  a broad subject range
• Closed system maintains quality
• Can be a full node or a collection node

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Built on Existing Work

• ROADS Whois
• Directory Services LDAP
• Lightweight Directory Access Protocol
• White pages directories
• Common Indexing Protocol (CIP)

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Three Components of the Information Architecture

• Index service
• Common Indexing Protocol (CIP)
• Search service
• Lightweight Directory Access Protocol LDAP
• User Interface
• Web browser, forms

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Index Service CIP

• Generates indexes from each collection of
  metadata
• Gathers indexes from other nodes
• Installs indexes on full nodes to use for
  referrals

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Search Service LDAP

• Makes metadata collection available for indexing
  and searching
• Query processing, returning results
• Query referrals

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User Interface Web forms

• Web browser, using forms
• Locally configurable
• Multiple access points to Isaac Network

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Scout Team Support

• Software suite
• Technical expertise and support
• Software installation and configuration
• Data extraction
• Metadata development
• Field determination
• Schema mapping
• Documentation
• Outreach and dissemination

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Content Partner Criteria

• Metadata applied DC or mapped to DC
• Minimum field set
• Title, author, subject or keywords, resource
  description, URL
• UNIX host
• Expertise to work with Scout team
• Data extraction and conversion
• Metadata mapping

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Isaac Interoperability

• ROADS
• Demo version of LDAP/Whois gateway
• UK recently announced the Resource Discovery
  Network Center (RDNC)
• Centralized support for subject gateway
  development and operations existing and new
  gateways
• CHIC Pilot
• TERENA project to implement cross-searching
  across national research networks in Europe

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Current Content Partners

• Special Study Guides/SSG-Fachinformation
• Lower Saxony State and University Library,
  Goettingen, Germany
• Utilizing complete set of Dublin Core fields
• Cornell Law Library InSITE
• Filemaker Pro database
• Added author field at our request

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Responses International

• BUBL
• EEVL
• OMNI
• SOSIG
• DTV - Denmark
• EdNA - Australia

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Responses Established Projects

• AMICO - museums
• InfoMine
• Internet Public Library
• Librarians Index to Internet
• State of Washington

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Responses Local Projects

• DigLib - Louisiana State University
• ELVIS - Seneca College
• History Matters - CUNY, GMU
• Vlib Library Resources - Indiana University,
  Bloomington

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Future

• Cataloging tools
• harvest embedded metadata for human augmentation
• Indexing methods
• Search capabilities
• Ranking
• Proximity

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A Vision IMesh

• Will be more than one solution
• Networks will interoperate at content level
• US/UK/Australian collaboration

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Internet Scout Project

• Susan Calcari
• scal_at_cs.wisc.edu
• scout.cs.wisc.edu
• /scout-research
• Architecture Overview for Collaborators