Subject Gateways: Community: IMesh

The IMesh discussion list was set up as a forum to discussion international collaboration amongst subject gateways. While the DESIRE project focus is on european subject gateways, the technological challenges involved with building the DESIRE gateway network are shared by similiar initiatives around the world. IMesh provides an open forum for exchanging ideas and technology for promoting the subject gateway movement.

IMesh: International Collaboration on Internet Subject Gateways

IMESH Discussion list

The IMesh mailing list has been set up for discussion of the above issues. Membership of the list is open.

• To subscribe, mail to mailbase@mailbase.ac.uk containing the following text in the body of the message: subscribe imesh firstname lastname
• To send a message to the list: imesh@mailbase.ac.uk
• Further information is available from the Mailbase list adminstration pages
• Mailing list archives (at Mailbase)
• Search form at Mailbase (or below)
• See also IMesh pages within Mailbase for further mailing list information
• The mailing list for the Warwich 1999 IMesh workshop is also available online
• The First IMesh Workshop was held at Warwick University in the UK from June 2nd to June 4th 1999. The workshop was organised by the Resource Discovery Network Centre (RDNC) on behalf of the IMesh initiative with JISC support.

Issues for Discussion

The ECDL'98 meeting in Crete identified a number of issues for further discussion. To focus discussion and to make mailing list archives easier to navigate, The Subject line for IMesh postings should where possible reference one or more of the issues listed below. (headings have been borrowed from the ECDL'98 report)

IMesh exists to aid consensus building, skill and technology sharing for the subject gateway community: please send URLs and further suggestions for topics to the list.

• Framework: a comprehensive guide to what is available and where. This will be an essential tool for identifying resources that already exist and who to approach as potential partners.
• Guidelines (including Evaluation): a wealth of experience in creating and managing internet gateways, and the costs of these activities, exists in the community.
• Quality of Service: issues regarding quality assessment and agreements over quality criteria.
• Scope: most resources so far have been collected for use in research in higher education... Some countries want resources which are relevant and accessible to all levels of education, not just higher education. Mechanisms for widening the user base successfully and the funding implications of these additional activities will need to be fully articulated.

Background Reading

Related articles, reports, standards etc (these should be grouped under the above headings). Suggestions welcomed...

• Project Isaac - A Distributed Architecture for Resource Discovery Using Metadata (D-Lib June 1998)
• ROADS / DESIRE - Cross-Searching Subject Gateways - The Query Routing and Forward Knowledge Approach(D-Lib Jan 1998)
• D-Lib report from the Crete ECDL'98 Subject Gateways meeting
• W3C Metadata: Resource Description Framework (RDF)
• JISC's Resource Discovery Network
• Results and deliverables from DESIRE Resource Discovery activity
• DESIRE
  • Subject Gateways Handbook
  • Selection Criteria for Quality Controlled Information Gateways
  • The Role of Classification Schemes in Internet Resource Description and Discovery
  • Integration of Indexing and Subject Gateways
• RECCI: ROADS Evaluation of Cataloguing with Connection to Interoperability
• EEVL (Engineering Gateway) Evaluation Reports
• ROADS Project
• D-Lib Ready Reference: Subject Area Gateways
• Dublin Core
• W3C Metadata activity
• Metadata.Net
• The Advanced Search Facility ("tools for gathering and organizing information within and among information communities.")
• TF-CHIC
  • TERENA's TF-CHIC task force (Cooperative Hierarchical Indexing Coordination)
  • CHIC-Pilot (an attempt to " bring together and test a number of well-known de facto standards and widely used technologies into a coherent architecture")
  • Standards in the CHIC-Pilot Distributed Indexing Architecture
  • TF-CHIC library: distributed indexing, gathering and metadata resources
• Meta-Gateways
  • AlphaSearch
  • Argus Clearinghouse
• OCLC
  • Co-operative Online Resource Catalog (CORC) press release
  • CORC web site
  • Cataloguing Guidelines document (from InterCat work)
• your project here...
• Traugott Koch's proposed criteria for defining "Quality controlled subject services" (see also IMesh thread)

Technology Sharing

This is a list of Software resources which may be of use to the subject gateway community. The list right now shows a bias towards freely available, open-source resources. However there are a number of high quality commercial tools available (eg. OCLC's SiteSearch suite). If services would like to share their experience with commercial or free software packages on the IMesh mailing list, the list below will grow longer and more useful. As part of the ROADS project, UKOLN recently undertook a product comparison of a number of 'Information Gateway Software' packages, both commercial and freeware; this is well worth reading -- see the draft report on the UKOLN site (continuous updates are promised).

IMeskTk: the IMesh Toolkit Project is a JISC/NSF funded project. The project partners include the Internet Scout Project, UKOLN, ILRT and Loughborough University. More information is available on the IMesh Toolkit project pages.

• IndexData's Zebra Z39.50 Server (also used in ROADS for the ROADS ZPlugin)
• University of Michegan LDAP Server
• Netscape's Mozilla.Org LDAP Directory SDK Source Code Release
• RDF and Z39.50 implementations in Mozilla
• www.openldap.org for open source LDAP code
• ROADS Software Downloads (Perl code for WHOIS++, Centroids/CIP etc.)
• OCLC Z39.50 freely reusable code (C and Java)
• The Harvest Web indexing toolkit
• The Combine System for disributed indexing (used in DESIRE)
• ASF Freeware
• MetaWeb
• iMesh.com -- the other imesh project! No connection to this effort (yet!). iMesh.com offer tools for desktop-to-desktop distributed search, and appears to be largely focussed on MP3 searching.

Open-Source (for discussion: papers etc on open licencing models)

• The Cathedral and the Bazaar
• The Debian Free Software Guidelines
• Netscape Communicator Open Source Code White Paper
• Opensource.org (includes brief introduction)

Search Imesh Archives

Please send suggestions for other relevant sites to the IMESH list