About Us...

DESIRE was a major international project aiming to build large scale information networks for the research community.

What was the DESIRE Project?

Although the World Wide Web gives researchers unprecedented opportunities to find and distribute research results, the increasing amount of on-line information is causing problems for the users and providers of information services.

Users are finding it progressively harder to find the information that is of specific interest to them amongst a huge volume of irrelevant data. Even when they discover a resource that seems relevant, they cannot easily find out whether the information is reliable and recent.

Network providers are struggling to provide the physical communications bandwidth needed for the rapidly-growing information flow. Information providers are trying to cope with the demands of an entirely new medium: new types of content, new confidentiality concerns and new revenue models.

With support from the EU's Telematics Application Programme, phase 1 of the DESIRE project developed solutions to many of these problems. DESIRE phase 2 began in July 1998 and ended in June 2000 and the 10 partners continued this work, but with a more focussed scope: distributed Web indexing, subject-based Web cataloguing, directory services, and caching.

Background

Within DESIRE I, two categories of demonstrator were established:

• subject based search services based on selection, description and classification of high quality networked resources
• regional exhaustive search services based on indexing of metadata generated by automated web crawlers

DESIRE II intends to provide system enhancements to these services, and to work towards an organisational framework in which they can operate more efficiently. It will also explore more thoroughly interactions between these two sets of services. Much of this work will be concerned with emerging metadata standards and metadata management software. Issues relevant to search services cover a range of activities including creation of metadata, the organisation of metadata on web sites, selection of high quality resources, search and retrieval techniques and improvement of the user interface. Developing the human and organisational environment in which these activities take place will be critical for their success.

As services which build on DESIRE I results come into place, more attention needs to be given to how they work together, how they interact with communities of service providers and end-users, and how necessary shared frameworks are developed.

Subject gateways consciously emphasise the importance of skilled human involvement in the assessment and 'quality control' of their selected Internet resources. The core activity - selecting and attributing meaning to those resources - is a human activity. Subject gateways carry out activities that do not easily lend themselves to automation.

Objectives of DESIRE II

• Tools ready for exploitation by the European academic community for the development of indexes and catalogues of networked information
• Services built on these tools which allow researchers to locate information stored in a wide variety of forms (the World Wide Web, news services, archives of text files, catalogues of printed materials, etc.)
• An extended service to maintain caches of frequently-used on-line documents at strategic locations across Europe to reduce bandwidth requirements and improve the speed of retrieval by users
• A programme of dissemination and demonstration to encourage the use, development and extension of these services by the user community.

• An integrated European infrastructure for access to research information combining automatic indexing with content rating, description and selection to assist researchers in quickly locating high-quality resources;
• The extension of that infrastructure to incorporate information from a wide variety of sources - library catalogues, LDAP-based directories, FTP archives, newsgroups;
• A set of subject-specific information services built on the above technology by a pan-European network of subject-specialists and librarians;
• A pan-European caching network improving the performance and reducing the cost of information retrieval;
• Information in the form of "how-to" guides and training in the form of workshops for those wishing to build their own services exploiting the underlying technology of the above.

• Project Partners
• Background: DESIRE Phase 1
• What's planned for DESIRE 2?