Isaac Network Call for Collaborators

[Susan Calcari]

To the many content providers that read Web4lib, please consider joining us
as participants in the Isaac Network project, described below. I would be
glad to talk to you about the project or answer any questions.

Best regards,

Susan

(Apologies in advance for any cross-posting.)


The Isaac Network:
Information Seeker's Avenue to Authoritative Content

Call for Collaborators
November 17, 1998

The Isaac Network is a new initiative of the Internet Scout Project, which
is located in the Computer Sciences Department at the University of
Wisconsin-Madison. The Isaac Network initiative is co-sponsored by the
Coalition for Networked Information (CNI). A discussion session for
potential collaborators and other interested parties will be held at the
Coalition's Fall Task Force Meeting in December in Seattle.

The Isaac Network links together selective collections of high quality
Internet resources from content providers who have hand-chosen the
resources and who have developed metadata for each resource.  Using the
latest directory protocols and the Dublin Core metadata set, the Isaac
Network provides a search interface to multiple, distributed collections of
metadata. The overall goal is to allow users to submit a single query to
search geographically distributed and independently maintained metadata
collections and to return the combined results to the user.

The primary audience of the Internet Scout Project is the higher education
community, therefore our first priority will be to include collections of
interest to researchers and educators. These may include collections
developed by organizations from higher education, government, public
libraries, the non-profit sector, or commercial content providers. They may
be collections that focus on a particular topic or discipline, or that
cover a broad subject range.

Content providers who already have metadata for the Internet resources in
their collection have the highest potential to be early collaborators in
the Isaac Network. However, any providers of high-quality content are
encouraged to join discussions about the project in preparation for
possible participation later in the network's development.


Background

The explosion of information on the Internet has made it difficult for
researchers and educators to locate online resources that they deem
relevant and of high quality. Ultimately individuals have to decide for
themselves which resources are relevant and credible in a given situation.
However, the task of discovering these resources is much simplified if the
pool of possibilities is narrowed to a pre-selected subset of resources
chosen by information specialists to be of high quality.

Today there are numerous collections of "quality resources" available on
the Web; however, they are generally individual, autonomous sites, not
connected in any way to other quality collections. Internet users,
especially those in academia, need the ability to send a single search
command, which will reach specific quality collections, and just as
importantly, only those quality collections. The Isaac Network is being
built to provide end-users with a single search interface to a group of
metadata collections, which contain or reference highly selective Internet
resources.

The Coalition for Networked Information's Task Force meetings will be used
as a mechanism to disseminate information about the progress of the project
and lessons learned.  CNI Task Force members may also be asked to provide
comments and evaluations of the system.

Primary Goals of the Isaac Network Project:

* Utilizing metadata, provide a useful resource discovery service for
quality information sources.

* Allow collaborators to continue to develop, maintain, and manage their
own collections. Isaac provides a method to link the collections and will
not subsume any of the individual collections. Content providers retain
ownership of, control over, and credit for the metadata records shared
through the network.

* Experiment with metadata standards, such as the Dublin Core, to provide a
common set of attributes with which to catalog and subsequently search
collections of Internet resources.

* Develop a collaborative laboratory in which we can research topics of
interest, such as indexing algorithms and alternative user interfaces. We
will also explore the development of a set of guidelines for connecting
selective collections within the Isaac Network, and between Isaac and
similar international efforts.


The Isaac Network's infrastructure uses standard Internet protocols, such
as the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) and the Common Indexing
Protocol  (CIP) to distribute queries, return results, and exchange index
or centroid information. To our knowledge, to date the LDAP protocol has
been used only for white pages type directories. The Isaac project is the
first to use an LDAP directory for metadata records about resources and to
combine LDAP with CIP in a distributed index-sharing and query-routing
architecture.


Collaborators

The Isaac Network will link geographically distributed metadata collections
into a single, virtual metadata collection. We are primarily interested in
highly authoritative collections of Internet resources that have been
hand-selected by librarians or information specialists. These may include
collections developed by organizations from higher education, government,
public libraries, the non-profit sector, or commercial providers. (However,
from a practical standpoint, collections that don't consist of primarily
freely available resources will not be useful to the majority of Isaac
Network users). Collections may focus on a particular topic or discipline,
or cover a broad subject range.

The metadata in each repository should be high quality: specifically, it
should be applied by professional catalogers or information specialists
using a minimum of descriptive fielded data. The Scout Report Signpost
(http://scout.cs.wisc.edu/signpost/) database of metadata is an example of
such a repository.

The Internet Scout Project will assist collaborators by providing the
following resources:

1. The software components needed by each collaborator to share their
metadata over the virtual Isaac Network. All software components for the
project have been developed by the Internet Scout Project or have been
upgraded from publicly available software.

2. Technical support from Internet Scout Project staff in the
implementation of the software at the collaborator's site.

3. Metadata development support from Internet Scout Project staff during
the integration of the collaborator's collection into the Isaac Network.

4. Support materials including software documentation and user outreach
information.


Given the Internet Scout Project's finite resources, we are looking for a
limited number of collaborators (6 - 8) to participate in the initial phase
of the testbed. We would like to partner with organizations that have
and/or can provide the following:

1. An existing collection of human-mediated metadata about Internet
resources that is regularly verified and updated:

*  The collection should contain more than 500 records but fewer than 20,000
*  The metadata should include at least the following fields:
 	Author
Title
Subject or Keywords
Resource Description
URL

2. Computing resources to run the Isaac software:

*A machine directly connected to the Internet, with at least 200 Mb of free
disk space running one of the following versions of Unix:
SunOS/Solaris
Digital Unix
HP-UX
AIX
IRIX

3. Expertise and time to work with the Internet Scout Research Team to
develop data extraction/conversion tools to facilitate the export/import of
metadata records and to establish mappings between metadata formats.


A general overview of the project goals and architecture is available in an
article in the June 1998 issue of D-Lib Magazine, "A Distributed
Architecture for Resource Discovery Using Metadata." For the Project's
architecture, read Project Isaac Architecture Overview for Collaborators.
Both can be accessed from the Scout Research page:

http://scout.cs.wisc.edu/scout/research/index.html


If you are interested in participating, please contact us at the addresses
below with your interests, general information about your collection, and
the URL of your site.

 Susan Calcari (scal at cs.wisc.edu), Project Director. For content or
technical issues, please contact Amy Tracy Wells (awel at cs.wisc.edu),
Content Coordinator, or Mike Roszkowski (mfr at cs.wisc.edu), Technical
Coordinator.



The Coalition for Networked Information (CNI), a joint program of the
Association of Research Libraries and Educause, is an organization to
advance the transformative promise of networked information technology for
the advancement of scholarly communication and the enrichment of
intellectual productivity. More information on CNI can be found at
http://www.cni.org/.

The Internet Scout Project, which is funded by the National Science
Foundation and is located in the Computer Sciences Department at the
University of Wisconsin-Madison, is charged with assisting the higher
education community in resource discovery on the Internet. To that end, the
Scout Report and subsequent subject-specific Scout Reports were developed
to guide the U.S. higher education community to research-quality resources.
The content of all the Scout Reports is archived in the Scout Report
Signpost, which holds resource descriptions on over 5000 Internet
resources. More than 2500 of these resources have been cataloged using
established standards such as Library of Congress subject headings and
abbreviated call letters, and emerging standards such as the Dublin Core
(DC). More information about the Internet Scout Project can be found at
http://scout.cs.wisc.edu/.

The Internet Scout Project provides information about the Internet to the
U.S. research and education community under a grant from the National
Science Foundation, number NCR-9712163. The Government has certain rights
in this material.


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Susan Calcari                                            Sponsored by the
Project Director                                National Science Foundation
Internet Scout Project
Computer Sciences Department             scal at cs.wisc.edu
1210 W. Dayton Street                               phone: 608.265.8042
University of Wisconsin -- Madison         http://scout.cs.wisc.edu/
Madison, WI 53706

The Scout Report: "...People Magazine of the Netheads."
(uuhh wait.. is that a compliment??  ;-)
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