Workshop A: Web-wide Indexing/Semantic Header or Cover Page

Chair: Bipin C. Desai, Brian Pinkerton

Luke Emery First Step Research is a private commercial enterprise doing work in the area of public access (Moscow/Pullman) and commercial networking services. More broadly, we are a consulting organization focused on the application of advanced technologies to the solution to real world problems....(pretty broad, and more clearly articlulated within our www sites: http://www.fsr.com and/or http://www.moscow.com). Among other things, we are providing an experimental web-based community oriented information repository with interesting and relevant local and global stores of information. It is called Palouse Net and includes a community calender of events, classified ads, a local business listing, and many other things. This service is being provided for free to the local web community and everywhere else. Check out http://www.fsr.com/pn.html. There are currently about 4000 entries in our repository. In addition, we are actively pursuing other web based technologies for both our outside consulting work and internal uses. We have implemented our own http server, browser (still minimal) and a web robot that may be used for both internal page and link verification and scanning the web for information. It contains hooks to be used for context sensitive information scanning and may be constrained in many different ways. It does not however, follow ALL the reccomended robot guidelines ;(. So, in summary, FSR is quite interested in the evolution of the web, information repositories, and emerging standards for indexing and distributed information retrieval, and has a technical background in networking and distributed computing to back it up.