RFD: comp.infosystems.harvest

                        REQUEST FOR DISCUSSION (RFD)
                unmoderated group comp.infosystems.harvest

Summary:             The Harvest information discovery and access system.
Proposed by:         Michael Schwartz <schwartz@cs.colorado.edu>
Technical Contact:   Duane Wessels <wessels@cs.colorado.edu>

This is the official Request For Discussion concerning the creation of
a new group called comp.infosystems.harvest.  This is not a call for
votes.  If an agreement about the new group is reached within a
discussion period lasting 21-30 days, this RFD will be followed with a
formal Call For Votes.  The CFV will be posted to the same newsgroups
and mail lists as this RFD, namely:

  news.announce.newgroups, news.groups,
  comp.infosystems.gopher, comp.infosystems.www.misc,
  comp.infosystems.www.providers, comp.infosystems.www.users,
  www-announce@mail.w3.org, www-proxy@mail.w3.org

Discussion of this proposal should take place in news.groups.


BACKGROUND

    Harvest is an integrated set of customizable tools to gather,
    extract, organize, search, cache, and replicate relevant
    information across the Internet.  More information is available at
    http://harvest.cs.colorado.edu/.

RATIONALE

    At present we have one mailing list for new release announcements,
    and another mailing list for users to ask the Harvest team
    technical questions.  We are getting an increasingly frequent
    stream of requests for a forum where users can communicate among
    themselves.  Additionally, Harvest related messages have been
    appearing in various comp.infosystems.www.* newsgroups where they
    may be inappropriate.

    We believe there is now a sufficiently large user base to warrant a
    separate group.  As an indication, at present there are Harvest
    servers installed at hundreds of sites worldwide, with new servers
    being created and registered increasingly often.  Also, there are
    Harvest users at over 10,000 sites in 90 countries.

CHARTER

    The proposed newsgroup is intended as a place for users of the
    Harvest software to help each other and exchange ideas.  The
    Harvest development team will monitor the group and reply to
    technical and other appropriate messages.

    Harvest has a number of software components: a gatherer/content
    extractor, a broker/indexer, a cache, and a replicator.  The
    proposed newsgroup will be an appropriate place to discuss each of
    these subsystems.

    Example topics may include:
        - How to customize a broker.
        - Porting Harvest to an unsupported platform.
        - Organizing a large replication group.
        - Suggestions for features and improvements.


PROCEDURE

    To make comments about this RFD, please use the "followup" command,
    which will post your response to the "news.groups" newsgroup.  A
    call for votes (CFV) will be issued approximately four weeks after
    this RFD.  Please do not post votes at this time.  When the CFV is
    posted, there will be instructions on how to mail your votes to the
    independent vote counter.

Received on Monday, 5 June 1995 07:33:42 UTC