CURRENT_MEETING_REPORT_ Reported by Kevin Gamiel/MCNC - CNIDR Minutes of the Networked Information Retrieval Working Group (NIR) Jim Fullton gave a general overview of the MCNC Clearinghouse for Networked Information Discovery and Retrieval (CNIDR). CNIDR is funded by the National Science Foundation to promote the use and development of networked information tools and systems. Anders Gillner from a RARE ISUS task force gave a presentation on the Eurogopher. The Eurogopher is an attempt to establish a geography-based as well as subject-based gopher infrastructure throughout Europe. The NIR report was discussed in some detail and edited by the group. o It was decided that NCSA's Mosaic for X should not be a stand-alone category, but rather indicated as a client under the World Wide Web category. o The WAIS and freeWAIS categories will be merged as WAIS/freeWAIS. Brewster Kahle and Jim Fullton will write parallel descriptions of each and will resubmit those writings to Jill for the next update. o The Grateful Med item was voted out of the report as it was generally considered not to be an open network resource. Also voted to be removed from the report was the group Lister Hill National Center for Biomedical Communications, National Library of Medicine. o Section 3 of the report will be edited to expand all acronyms. o The ZIT has been dissolved and therefore will be removed from the report. o Mark Needleman completed a tool template for the Z39.50 protocol. Since it is a protocol and not a tool, it was decided to port the template to a group template on the Z39.50 Implementors Group (ZIG). o comp.infosystems.www will be added to the newsgroup templates. o CNIDR is considering publishing the report on-line. Access could be via FTP, gopher, Wais, and WWW. Any details will be posted to the NIR list as they become available (after the meeting, a representative from the InterNIC expressed interest in doing this as well). o It was agreed that the full report should be updated once per year, 1 although more regular updating of the individual sections held on-line should be possible. Reinhard Doelz discussed his NIR tool checklist. The checklist was very extensive and ambitious. Several schemes for maintaining the list were discussed, including on-line telnet ``holes'' allowing the user to complete the checklist. As a first cut, however, April volunteered to prune the checklist into a fairly simple list. Reinhard's work was deemed a useful resource for users deciding on NIR tools and will be posted to the mailing list. The group agreed to remove the sections concerning the provision of documentation and training materials for NIR tools from the charter. It was agreed that this is too ambitious and out of scope. Attendees Chris Adie C.J.Adie@edinburgh.ac.uk Toshiya Asaba asaba@iij.ad.jp Zavisa Bjelogrlic zavisa@roma.intecs.it Luc Boulianne lucb@cs.mcgill.ca Kursat Cagiltay kursat@vm.cc.metu.edu.tr Jodi-Ann Chu jodi@uhunix.uhcc.hawaii.edu David Conrad davidc@iij.ad.jp Reinhard Doelz embnet@comp.bioz.unibas.ch Jill Foster Jill.Foster@newcastle.ac.uk Jim Fullton fullton@cnidr.org Kevin Gamiel kgamiel@cnidr.org Ben Geerlings ben.geerlings@surfnet.nl Maria Heijne maria.heijne@surfnet.nl Marco Hernandez marco@mh-slip.cren.edu Rune Hjelsvold Rune.Hjelsvold@idt.unit.no Per Jacobsen p.h.jacobsen@usit.uio.no Xander Jansen xander.jansen@surfnet.nl Brewster Kahle Brewster@wais.com John Kunze jak@violet.berkeley.edu John Lindsay lindsay@kingston.ac.uk Anne Lord anne@ripe.net April Marine april@atlas.arc.nasa.gov Linda Millington l.millington@noc.ulcc.ac.uk Pushpendra Mohta pushp@cerf.net Lisa Nielsen lisa@hawaii.edu Mark Prior mrp@itd.adelaide.edu.au Joyce K. Reynolds jkrey@isi.edu Ulla Sandberg ulla@kiera.ericsson.se Rickard Schoultz schoultz@admin.kth.se Jennifer Sellers sellers@nsipo.nasa.gov A. Velu Sinha avsinha@attmail.com Patricia Smith psmith@merit.edu Milan Sova sova@feld.cvut.cz Bert Stals bert.stals@surfnet.nl 2 Marc van der Noordaa noordaa@rare.nl Guido van Rossum guido@cwi.nl Chris Weider clw@merit.edu 3