Accessing bibliographic data using X.500

[Paul Barker <[e-mail]>]

The ABDUX project (ABDUX = Accessing Bibliographic Data Using X.500)
has now published a set of documents describing its work.  The project 
name gives a fair indication of what the project has been about.

As one might expect, the documents which describe the projects work have
entries describing them in the directory.  While these entries use
the standard schema (and by standard I mean the extended schema described in
RFC1274) as much as possible, ABDUX has had to define new object classes and
attributes - these schema extensions are available along with the papers
by FTP.

Brunel University have produced user interfaces to this biblkiographic
information.  There is an X interface, which is a special configuration of
their XLU interface.  This has ben ehnanced to allow document previewing /
file retrieval when documents are available on-line.  There is also a text
version of the user interface.  (Details of how to get these user interfaces
will be sent in a separate message.)

To simplify access, there is a guest account to allow use of the project
software.  There is a test system which allows querying of 7 UK university
computer science research note collections, plus some other directory
related material.  This information is distributed across four DSAs at three
sites.

The ABDUX project notes are available from the directory:

//cs.ucl.ac.uk/abdux/

In particular...

The schema extensions are in the file

//cs.ucl.ac.uk/abdux/abduxoids.tar.Z

There is a guide to the documents in:

//cs.ucl.ac.uk/abdux/README

The guest service can be accessed by telnet to:

  blu.brunel.ac.uk

login as blu, and select option 1 for RESEARCH NOTES at the initial menu.
Please send any comments you have as to the usefulness of the service, the
usability of the current interface, etc, etc to:

[e-mail] and [e-mail]