DESIRE is an integrative project, building where possible on emerging and existing standards and technologies rather than developing new ones. ROADS is one of these and offers a resource discovery solution for the Information Gateways which form part of the DESIRE vision. There are now many ROADS-based information gateways, either full services or demonstrators, which might serve as a useful resource for anyone interested in developing or exploiting the models which DESIRE offers.

Subject gateways involve information professionals and subject specialists who create and maintain a collection of selected high quality Internet resources. They use similar skills to those employed in a "real" library. The collection is made up of catalogued records that refer to WWW sites, datasets electronic journals, FTP sites and mailing lists. Each service allows end-users to make complex, transparent searches of the collection and potentially search across a pre-selected set of distributed information gateways.

ROADS offers a selection of software tools and standards to support the infrastructural requirements of subject gateways. With its emphasis on configurability and interoperability it allows each to develop its own unique identity and content.

ROADS uses the WHOIS++ search and retrieve protocol which enables ROADS users to make complex transparent searches across multiple gateways as if they had a common index. ROADS based IGs can work together to form a comprehensive distributed resource discovery system.

ROADS Based Information Gateways
http://www.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/roads/who/

A list of services which are currently running either partial or a full ROADS based subject information gateway.

ROADS based Demonstrators
http://www.konbib.nl/roads/

The Dutch Desire Demonstrator for the Arts and Social Sciences. This ROADS-based demonstrator provides a selection of Dutch resources in the fields of Art and Social Sciences, the resources are a subset from the resources selected for DutchESS by subject specialist of the KB and other Dutch (academic) libraries. Please Note: This demonstrator is for experimental purposes only and not an operational service.