BUILDING LARGE-SCALE INFORMATION-SERVICES - TOOLS AND EXPERIENCES FROM THE DESIRE PROJECT

Building a personal or company web site is now a commonplace activity, with an increasing array of commercial tools available to make the ta sk easier and an increasing number of search facilities available to h elp users locate information on these sites. Mostly, though, the model for information access is based on the notion of a single provider an d a single consumer. The research community has a very different model of the information service: information is drawn from a wide range of providers and distributed to a large and discerning collaborative com munity. The task of creating and operating continental-scale informati on services brings a whole new set of challenges: assessing the qualit y of information; integrating information from many sources and in man y languages; optimising the location of information to make best use o f network bandwidth; maintaining service quality given a widely-distri buted set of service components. In this brief overview, we investigat e the developing technology which can be applied to address these need s and the extent to which they have been successfully deployed in the DESIRE project, undertaken by 23 partner organisations as part of the Telematics Application Programme supported financially by the European Commission's DG XIII, More information about the project, the partner s and the complete set of project deliverables can be found on the Pro ject Web Site (http://www.desire, org/). (C) 1998 Elsevier Science B.V . All rights reserved.