Re: It's a dessert topping, it's a floor wax!

[Jill Foster <[e-mail]>]

Well g'day to you too, Peter!

Continuing along the lines of "let's not get into this debate......"

As Peter says - we have a growing constituency of low speed link users. Not
just those in Eastern Europe and other "technologically emerging" countries
(we've been training folk from these countries in the ISOC Workshops) - but
in the UK and North America - with the small colleges connecting up via
slow speed links, schools getting connected, myself and others over dialup
IP from home, etc etc. What I'd *really* like to see is some effort going
into the NIR tools to have negotiation between the client and server on
bandwidth usage/compression. The user needs to be able to say: I'm at home
now - please use compression to send that picture to me. (There are lots of
other associated features too.)

The next thing I'd like to see is a move away from the 'stateless'
protocols to something on which we can build sessions such as interactive
tutorials that change as a result of user input. (We have the elements of
this on the horizon in some of the HTML3 and URL discussions.)

Finally - to get back to the purpose of this list (to notify new
developments in NIR tools or Groups) - I just saw a demo of INGRID.

This is a Self configuring Information Grid which allows searching and
browsing. Paul Francis and a research group from NTT Japan have an alpha
release of the system and are keen to get feedback on it. The idea is that
information resources are linked to other info resources that are similar
to them (using a small number of keywords applied to each resource). These
form clusters of related resources.

Some nice ideas. Not sure how scalable it is - but if you're interested -
take a look at the full paper:

http://www.ntt.jp/ntt/soft-labs/ingrid/overview.html

Cheers -- Jill