Harvest:  A Scalable, Customizable Discovery and Access System

Presented by Michael Schwartz/University of Colorado

Biography:  Michael Schwartz is an Associate Professor of Computer
Science at the University of Colorado, Boulder.  His research focuses on
issues raised by international networks and distributed systems, with
particular focus on resource discovery and network measurement.
Schwartz chairs an Internet Research Task Force Research Group on
Resource Discovery, and is on the editorial boards for IEEE/ACM
Transactions on Networking and for Internet Society News.  Schwartz
holds a B.S. in Mathematics-Computer Science from UCLA, and an M.S. and
Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Washington.


The IRTF Research Group on Resource Discovery has developed 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 our system that
highlight the strengths of our approach, and discuss work in progress to
extend the system for use with more complex data objects.