About Us: Background

In addition to the brief overview presented here, the following papers present an overview of the work undertaken during the first phase of the DESIRE project. See the deliverables listing for an summary of the project outcomes.

• ROADS to DESIRE (Lorcan Dempsey, D-Lib Magazine, July/August 1996)
• TERENA Networking Conference 1998 - Overview of DESIRE 1
• The DESIRE project - promoting and facilitating Web usage among Europe's research community (Emma Worsfold and Debra Hiom, pre-print of article to be published in the journal New Review of Information Networking)

DESIRE Phase 1

Phase 1 of the project is now complete. The following areas were addressed:

• Large-scale pilot services for helping users to find the information they need by providing subject-specific resource catalogues, quality-assured by specialist reviewers.
• An indexing system is being built that will automatically harvest and index on-line information in Europe, taking into account the need to access resources in different languages.
• An international information-caching mesh is being built which will reduce the load on network infrastructure by keeping copies of frequently-requested information close to the point of access.
• Innovative methods to remotely manage web servers in a standard fashion.
• Smartcards are being used to give researchers access via the public network to confidential or licensed information sources with security similar to that of dedicated private networks.