Objective

To enhance accessibility to and interoperability among distributed information repositories through development of a virtual software bus, InfoBus, which will transparently translate formats, broker services and support financial transactions.

Accomplishments

Building a testbed consisting of computing literature sources, including Knight-Ridder's Dialog service, MIT Press, the ACM, the World Wide Web, and Stanford's libraries.

Developing interfaces which permit users to interact with many repositories without having to be aware of the query format requirements of each individual repository, and which permit multiple users to interact with and annotate documents while preserving the original.

Developing information filtering services, such as the Glossary of Servers Server (GLOSS) prototype, which assembles meta-information about repositories to direct user queries, and the Stanford Information Filtering Tool (SIFT) prototype, which matches user-interest profiles with large numbers of documents.

Developing prototype mehanism (InterPay) for interacting with many emerging electronic payment schemes.

Developing models, infrastructure, protocols and agents for interaction among documents and services.

Significance

Interoperability issues are generic challenges to all digital library system. Solutions developed here will have broad applicability to other systems.

Plans

This agreement expires in Fiscal Year 1998.

Point of Contact

Dr. Hector Garcia-Molina
Dept. of Computer Science
Stanford University
Gates Hall 4A, Room 434
Stanford, CA 94305-9040
Phone: 415-723-0685
Email: hector@ cs.stanford.edu