From: brewster@Think.COM (Brewster Kahle)
Subject: WAIS-discussion digest #59: How to get the ball rolling
Organization: Comp.Center (RUS) U of Stuttgart, FRG
Date: Sat, 9 Jan 1993 22:48:08 GMT


       Forum On Wide Area Information Servers and Electronic Publishing
                              Brewster Kahle
                 

Contents:
     Sun's SearchIt compared to WAIS (Jim Davis)
     New release: WAIStation.app 1.9.6 for NeXT (burchard@geom.umn.edu)
     Call For Papers: ACM TIS Special Issue on Text Categorization (David Lewis)
     New List of Wais servers for biology (Ing. Paolo Romano)


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Date: Thu, 3 Dec 1992 12:04:40 -0500
From: Jim Davis <davis@DRI.cornell.edu>
Subject: Sun's SearchIt compared to WAIS

Since no one else has mentioned Sun's SearchIt here I thought I would
give a summary of its features, as determined from the online
documentation for it.

It is very similar to WAIS.  The basic paradigm is that one searches
one or more Indexes for documents containing words.  The search
returns a list of documents, and one can then click on documents to
view.  The user interface looks very much like WAIS'.  It has
something similar to Relevance Feedback, but the documentation does
not give technical details.  There is some kind of support for
searching indexes on other machines, but I dont know what kind of
protocol is used.

There is an indexing tool, which appears to have some support for
selecting and filtering the kinds of files and directories to be
indexed.  In ordinary WAIS this is kind of a pain, one has to write
shell scripts.

One difference is that SearchIt supports a variety of kinds of
searches found in more traditional searching systems (e.g. Boolean).
It supports adjacency, "near" (within 256 characters), and, or, not,
and wildcard.

It allows users to provide thier own Thesaurus for term expansion.

It can index plain text files, mail files, and also (at least) files
created by FrameMaker and InterLeaf.

It has its own means of scheduling periodic indexing.  This is
probably more user friendly than having to use the Unix crontab.

I have no measurements for comparative performance.  I have a demo
version, but I have not been able to get it to run.

------------------------------

Date: Sat, 5 Dec 92 18:07:06 PST
From: burchard@geom.umn.edu
Subject: New release: WAIStation.app 1.9.6 for NeXT


[forwarded by brewster]

I've submitted a new version of the NeXTSTEP WAIS client to the
"incoming" directory on think.com; it will eventually end up in
the "wais" directory.  Look for version 1.9.6.

The major improvements and fixes in this version:

* This version is now fully compatible with NeXTSTEP 3.0.  The
	source and executable have nevertheless been maintained
	in NeXTSTEP 2.0-compatible form, for those who haven't
	upgraded yet.
	
	It also incorporates close to the latest version of the
	WAIS IR library, wais-8-b5.

* Better preferences allow you to specify:
	-- how to convert WAIS document types into file types
	-- how to rank WAIS document types when a server offers
		the same document in multiple formats
	-- individually, where each of the system and personal
		WAIS directories is; this lets you use directories
		compatible with other client software if necessary

* Some color icons!

Enjoy...
 --------------------------------------------------------------------
 Paul Burchard   <burchard@geom.umn.edu>
 ``I'm still learning how to count backwards from infinity...''
 --------------------------------------------------------------------

------------------------------

Date: Sun, 13 Dec 92 16:48 EST
From: lewis@research.att.com (David Lewis)
Subject: Call For Papers: ACM TIS Special Issue on Text Categorization


                         Call For Papers
              Special Issue on Text Categorization 
             ACM Transactions on Information Systems

                  Submissions due: June 1, 1993

   Text categorization is the classification of units of natural
language text with respect to a set of pre-existing categories.
Reducing an infinite set of possible natural language inputs to a
small set of categories is a central strategy in computational systems
that process natural language.  Some uses of text categorization have
been:

       --To assign subject categories to documents in support of text
retrieval and library organization, or to aid the human assignment of
such categories.
       --To route messages, news stories, or other continuous streams
of texts to interested recipients.
       --As a component in natural language processing systems, to
filter out nonrelevant texts and parts of texts, to route texts to
category-specific processing mechanisms, or to extract limited forms
of information.
       --As an aid in lexical analysis tasks, such as word sense
disambiguation.
       --To categorize nontextual entities by textual annotations, for
instance to assign people to occupational categories based on free
text responses to survey questions.

   ACM Transactions on Information Systems is the leading forum for
presenting research on text processing systems.  For this special
issue we encourage the submission of high quality technical
descriptions of algorithms and methods for text categorization.
Experiments comparing alternative methods are especially welcome, as
are results on deploying systems into regular use.

   Five copies of each manuscript should be submitted to either of the
special issue editors at the addresses below:

David D. Lewis                             Philip J. Hayes
AT&T Bell Laboratories                     Carnegie Group, Inc.
600 Mountain Ave.                          Five PPG Place
Room 2C409                                 Pittsburgh, PA 15222
Murray Hill, NJ 07974                      USA
USA                                        hayes@cgi.com   
lewis@research.att.com

Submission	June 1, 1993
Notification 	October 1, 1993
Revision	February 1, 1994
Publication	mid-1994

The July 1990 issue of TIS contains a description of the style requirements. 


------------------------------

From: paolo@istge.ist.unige.it (Ing. Paolo Romano)
Subject: New List of Wais servers for biology
Date: Wed, 23 Dec 92 16:59:28 MET

Dear wais-people, 

I'm in charge of the system management of the databases that
were created in Italy in the sphere of the Interlab Project. They refer
to availability of biological materials in European biomedical research 
laboratories. In order to extend the distribution of these databases, 
I'm implementing them as WAIS servers too. One of these servers is
already working since the beginning of October and its source file is
included in the directory of servers at think.com.

I am currently preparing an article describing recents developments of
Interlab Project Databases in which I also describe the WAIS server.
I thought it could be interesting to list all servers in biology.
I searched the directory-of-servers at think.com and the WAIS servers at
the University of Indiana. I posted to wais-talk and sent to the
maintainers of the servers a preliminary list and finally I got the following 
list that I'm going to add to the article as an appendix. 

I would be glad if all people receiving this message could check the list
and send me additions and/or corrections. All people contributing to this
upgradeing will be aknowledged in the article. All contributions could be
sent directly to me and I could post a summary.

Thank you in advance.

Appendix 1: List of WAIS servers of interest for biology and biotechnology.

In this appendix, WAIS servers of interest for biology and biotechnology 
are grouped by host. For each host, the Internet name is shown, followed 
by the address of people in charge for maintainance, and the list of servers 
for each of which the source file name is reported together with a short 
description, taken from the original source file.

bio.vu.nl (deboer@bio.vu.nl)
 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
- biology-compounds: Peter Karps CompoundKB database, consisting of 981
  metabolic intermediate compounds
- EC-enzyme: EC enzyme database of A. Bairoch
- rebase-enzyme: REBASE restriction enzyme database of R. Roberts, Cold 
  Spring Harbor Lab.
- blocks: Database of blocks of sequences derived from SWISS-PROT parsed with
  the corresponding PROSITE entries

cmns-moon.think.com (bug-public@think.com)
 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
- Molecular-biology: Annotation of the GenBank DNA sequence database (Bacterial 
  Division) - release 64.0

ftp.bio.indiana.edu (archive@bio.indiana.edu)
 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
- INFO: List of WAIS sources available at this site
- arcdocs: Index of abstracts, readme, help and related infos on the IUBio 
  Archive of Biology Software and Data
- fly-address: Index of the addresses for Drosophila researchers
- fly-amero: Database of polytene chromosome sites found to bind antibodies 
  to particular Drosophila proteins
- fly-clones: Index of UCLA DROSOPHILA GENMAPS DATABASE, sources of 
  information in Drosophila melanogaster genetics
- fly-din: Index of the Drosophila Information Newsletter
- flybase: Drosophila database, FlyBase
- flystock-bg: Drosophila stocks maintained at Bowling Green USA
- flystock-bl: Drosophila stocks maintained at Bloomington USA
- flystock-um: Drosophila stocks maintained at Umea Sweden
- gbnew: Index of updates sinces the latest Genbank release 
- genbank: Index of the Genbank databank of gene sequences
- journals: Table of contents of journals taken from the biosci newsgroup 
  bionet.journals.contents
- methods: Index of a collection of materials and methods recipes for 
  molecular biologists
- netnews: Index of news articles from Bionet, Sci.Bio and 
  bitnet.listserv.info-gcg groups
- prosite: PROSITE database (compilation of sites and patterns found in 
  protein sequences)
- redbook: Index of "The Genome of Drosophila melanogaster": descriptions
  of all known genes, chromosome arrangements, lethals, and other genetic 
  aspects

istge.ist.unige.it (wais@istge.ist.unige.it)
 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
- cldb: Interlab Project Cell Line Data Base, version 2.3

munin.ub2.lu.se (anders@munin.ub2.lu.se)
 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
- environment-newsgroups: Archive of messages in a number of environmental 
  related USENET newsgroups
- lolita-miljo: Lund University library catalog: a selection of environmental 
  related literature (some texts in Swedish)
- miljodatabas: Environmental related research projects at Lund University 
  (in Swedish, but with English titles)

net.bio.net (biosci@net.bio.net)
 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
- biology-journal-contents: References to journals in the area of molecular 
  biology, such as NAR, EMBO and CABIOS
- biosci: Bionet hierachy USENET newsgroups messages

solomon.technet.sg (waisguy@solomon.technet.sg)
 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
- prosite: PROSITE database (compilation of sites and patterns found in 
  protein sequences)

wais.funet.fi (harper@wais.funet.fi)
 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
- bionic-ai-researchers: Database of molecular biologists working in the field
  of artificial intelligence (maintainer L. Hunter)
- bionic-algorithms: Literature references to algorithms related to molecular 
  biology 
- bionic-arabidopsis: Research workers involved in Aradopsidosis research
- bionic-biosci-docs: Texts collected from the Biosci network
- bionic-databases-limb: List of databases available for molecular biologists
- bionic-directory-of-servers: Listing of bionic sources on the Finnish server
- bionic-embl-software: Listing of software available from EMBL
- bionic-enzyme: A. Bairoch Enzyme database
- bionic-genbank-software: List of software at EMBL for the GenBank database 
- bionic-info-gcg-archive: Files from the INFO-GCG mailing list
- bionic-journal-contents: Literature references from molecular biology journals
- bionic-networking: Texts explaining networking to biologists (Biobit)
- bionic-sequence-bibliography: A. Bairoch literature database on sequence 
  analysis


weeds.mgh.harvard.edu (curator@frodo.mgh.harvard.edu)
 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
- AAtDB: WAIS version of AAtDB (An Aradopsidosis thaliana Database)
- Arabidopsis-BioSci: Index of all messages on the BioSci Aradopsidosis
  Genome Electronic Conference, since March 1991
- ACEDB: WAIS version of ACEDB (A Caenorhabditis elegans Database)

welchlab.welch.jhu.edu (francois@welch.jhu.edu)
 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
- online-mendelian-inheritance-in-man: Catalogs of Autosomal Dominant, 
  Autosomal Recessive and X-Linked Phenotypes, from V. A. McKusick

=============================================================================

Many thanks to Anders Ardo, Thon de Boer, Mike Cherry, Don Gilbert, Rob
Harper, Dave Kristofferson, Francois Schiettecatte and Una Smith.

------------------------------

End of WAIS-discussion Digest 59
************************

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Newsgroups: alt.wais