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Abstracts
sorted by last name of speaker

Cengiz Alaettinoglu: Routing Arbiter Project: Routing Policy Framework - Abstract

The Routing Arbiter project is designing, implementing, and deploying mechanisms that enable providers to describe, publish, and analyze routing policies. The first component of this framework is the open IETF Standard "Routing Policy Specification Language". This language allows providers to abstractly specify their policies in a router vendor independent manner. The second component is a distributed routing registry system where providers can publish their policies without relying on other entities on the Internet. The third component is RAToolSet, a set of tools for analyzing the routing policies published in this system. The analysis includes: configuring routers from the abstract policy specifications, analyzing reachability, improving CIDR aggregation, or simply visualizing the provider policies graphically.

Bent B. Andresen: The virtual teaching environment - Abstract

The presentation considers the educational strengths and weaknesses of Internet tools, e.g., E-mail, text and video conferences, and the world wide web. In particular, it explores the premises that none of these technologies is inherently good or bad for teaching. It's’ the way they are used in educational settings that matters. Therefore, it is not just a technical issue of choosing the appropriate technology. Knowing when to use a particular technology for teaching is a pedagogical issue. Important pedagogical considerations are: What are the best teaching applications for a particular technology for learning? What are the educational strengths and weaknesses of these best applications? The talk presents some pedagogical criteria to help in the decision making process. In particular, it considers Internet tools a framework for open and distance learning. Most higher education institutions now have open or flexible learning centres to foster educational development. Flexible learning is increasing in further and adult education, as well as in industry, commerce and social services. The talk discusses the scope of this trend and considers it a move toward a new educational paradigm in the form of virtual teaching and learning environments.

Anders Ardö: Nordic Web Index - Abstract

The Nordic Web Index (NWI) project is a collaborative effort across the Nordic countries, (supported among others by NORDINFO) providing a free Web search service to the general public in the Nordic countries. We are today providing access to databases covering the WWW in the Nordic countries, and as of January 1997 through three service points in Denmark [http://nwi.dtv.dk/], Finland [http://nwi.funet.fi/] and Sweden [http://nwi.ub2.lu.se/] with Norway and Iceland in process of beeing established.

Because of the "public service" nature of NWI and its architecture building on open standards, we are able to collaborate with other initiatives, be it public sector or commercial ones. NWI builds upon the idea of decentralization of harvesting, indexing as well as of the service points. The advantage is that it reduces network load and keeps a more up to date index of pages.

We are constantly working on improving the system with new services like specialized multimedia and metadata databases, specialized search interfaces, etc. [http://nwi.dtv.dk/nwi_info.html#news].

The NWI development team from DTV [http://www.dtv.dk/it/] and LUB NetLab [http://www.ub2.lu.se/netlab.html] are also involved in other efforts, such as the Desire project [http://www.nic.surfnet.nl/surfnet/projects/desire/], the Nordic Metadata Project [http://linnea.helsinki.fi/meta/] and TF-CHIC - the TERENA task force on Cooperative Hierarchical Indexing Coordination [http://www.terena.nl/working-groups/wg-isus] which have goals that overlaps with efforts to refine the NWI service.

Guntis Barzdins: Baltic Network Proliferation - Abstract

Internet development in Baltic countries of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania has started in 1992 by financial support from Nordic Council of Ministers and by technical advise and connectivity via NORDUnet. Today Internet in Baltic countries is as widely used by academic, business, and private community, as anywhere else in the world. From mere 128Kbps in 1993, the total capacity of international Internet connections into Baltic today has reached around 10Mbps.

Despite these great achievements, there are also less positive trends. Although academic networks very much dominated Internet development in the region until recent times, today commercial ISPs can offer the same service at the same price leaving academic networks without clear goal. The real danger here is not in academic networks becoming obsolete, but in clear trend of national telecoms to commercialize and monopolize Internet and thus restrict academic community from development of new information technologies, high speed networks etc.

Hjørdis Beier: Learn-IT - Abstract

With the educational programme ‘Learn-IT’, the Ministry of Education has taken an initiative to introduce IT to all teachers in the Danish Folkeskole. Learn-IT is a multimedia product available on CD-rom and Internet, where it will be constantly updated.
With Learn-IT as a startingpoint the the paper will address some central initiatives to promote the use of the Internet for in-service training, communication and as teaching materials for teachers and pupils.

Guðmundur Ragnar Guðmundsson: Impact on Society

The Internets future impact on society is hard to foresee. We can see short term effects and speculate about long term consequences. The simplest view is to etrapolate from the tools that we have and are using, looking at what would happen if that tecnology would be generally used in our society.

We can also speculate what would happen if some of the nifty new gismos would be accepted and generally used.

And of cource we would like to see a world where all have access without bandwith or hardware limitations.

But is this the future or are we missing some important pieces in the puzzle?

In the presentation I will look at areas where we have not done enough work, as of yet, where there is lack of research, technology and standards.

This is the field of automatical sharing of opinions, interests and perspectives. If our computers and the Net are going to be of use to a large majority of the population we must find ways to empower our computers with real information about what we think and want. This information should be shared through automatic mechanisms and used in finding the objects that we desire.

Rik Farrow: Security for small Internet Service Providers (ISPs) - Abstract

ISPs do have responsiblity for security of their own networks and the data passing through their networks. This session examines the system and network configurations, things which ISPs must do, and things which ISPs can do to provide a reasonably secure service to their customers, whether they be students, library patrons, or commercial users. We will also look at some security incidents involving ISPs.

David Hartley: European Update - Abstract

Since NORDUnet '95, the TEN-34 consortium has not only completed its deliberations, but the project has come to reality: the majority of the TEN-34 broadband network was in operation during April 1997. When complete this will provide an interconnection, using 34 Mbit/s technology, between the National Research Networks of every EU member state and other neighbouring countries.

The planning has been long and protracted. The presentation will analyse the reasons for this, and in particular will consider the extent to which these are technical, political, commercial and beaurocractic.

Juha Hakala: Nordic Metadata Project - Abstract

Lack and poor quality of metadata - Internet document and resource descriptions - is a serious problem for those trying to find information from the Web. Rapid development of search engines like Alta Vista and Nordic Web Index will make free text searching more effective, but in the same time growth of the Web will make it more difficult to enhance precision of searches.

Libraries and other information intermediaries will never have resources for describing a significant number of Internet documents manually. Author-provided metadata, embedded into the documents, has been proposed as an alternative. But to make this strategy feasible, a number of new tools are needed. The authors must have a simple format with which they can describe all kinds of document-like objects easily. To simplify metadata creation process further, user guides and other support is a must. In the indexing end of the chain, we need harvesting software which is capable of recognising and extracting metadata from documents, and indexing it for effective searching.

The Nordic Metadata (http://linnea.helsinki.fi/meta) is a NORDINFO project, which aims at providing exactly the things listed above. We have chosen to use the Dublin Core Metadata Element Set, which is a simple metadata format, consisting of 15 element (see http://purl.org/metadata/dublin_core). The project has developed applications (templates and Perl scripts) and documentation which make it easy to provide Dublin Core records to HTML documents (see http://www.ub.lu.se/metadata/DC_creator.html).

Our metadata harvester will be the Nordic Web Index, which is already well on it's way of becoming metadata aware. Compatibility with "legacy systems", ie. online public access catalogues in libraries, will be maintained by developing a Dublin Core -> MARC converter.

Peter Wad Hansen: Practical Web Tools - Abstract

This presentation will demonstrate how it is possible to create a dynamic web site using only simple tools which are "homegrown" or available free from the Internet. The tools that will be demonstrated are:

SWISH: A web indexing tool to make a web site searchable. Hypermail: An email to HTML converter with indexing. W3Conf: A web based conference system. WebQuiz: A multiple choice quiz which gives immediate feedback. Announce: A system for making announcements on the web. WhitePage: An easy to maintain persons catalogue. Press: System for publishing press releases.

The demonstration will take place live on a Linux PC showing what can be done by simple means and programming skills.

Göran Ingemarsson: Adaptive Networking - Abstract

With the explosion of web traffic on the Internet, and applications increasingly using web browser interface, this places new challenges on the network. Not only do traffic volumes increase, but more importantly: traffic patterns become unpredictable in direction and in time. This calls for a new internet network architecture, a network architecture that can autosense and adapt to network changes as they happen.

The presentation discusses this issue and possible solutions.

Allan Jensen: The new Danish Research Network - Abstract

The Danish Ministry of Research has allocated 120 Million DKK to build the next generation of Research Network in Denmark. The Ministry of Research is right now finalising the strategy for the Research Network and key items will be presented. The strategy includes visions for a radical shift in responsibility and duties between the network vendor, the network operator, the research institution and the Ministry. The strategy sets up solutions to satisfy the whishes for a more decentralised infrastructure in Denmark.

The new Research Network shall take over from the existing DENet. The Research Network will cover more institutions and have higher bandwidths. New technologies such as radiowawe links will be an important part of the infrastructure. Furthermore some new services will be added to the network.

Traugott Koch: A Virtual Library Model of DESIRE - Abstract

The Internet is not a virtual library. Parts of it can serve as digital libraries when the information offered is properly selected and treated, the knowledge organized/structured and discovery, search and other tools carefully developed.

The EU Telematics for Research project DESIRE (Development of a European Service for Information on Research and Education; http://www.ub2.lu.se/desire/) has, since almost two years, tried to develop in its Resource discovery and ndexing workpackage a framework for co-operative and distributed digital library services.
The approach is twofold: to support the creation of quality controlled subject services and the co-operative indexing of the European WWW using robot software, both focused on the European Academic community.

A generalised model of subject services will be developed, building upon already existing modules like a management software package, a quality model, a system for selection and quality criteria, an investigation of metadata standards, recommendations for resource description and recommendations for the usage of classification systems for knowledge organization.
Among the pilot services is SOSIG, a social sciences information gateway, that will be turned into a co-operative European service (http://www.sosig.ac.uk/).

In parallel, the architecture and a pilot service is developed for a robot-based distributed European Web Index, built upon experiences from a thorough and ongoing analysis of existing search services and retrieval software. Via a TERENA task force (CHIC) steps towards co-operative indexing are prepared. The Nordic Web Index serves as test-bed (http://nwi.dtv.dk/).

The DESIRE concept is to try different methods of integration between manually created quality services and robot-based databases to support the user in navigation, resource discovery and retrieval. The goal is to keep and explore in the best possible way the different levels of quality in the original documents and their descriptions.

Engineering Electronic Library, EELS and its companion database All engineering have taken the first steps towards that type of integration (http://www.ub2.lu.se/eel/).

The application for a continuation, DESIRE II, focuses among other things on further co-operation and distribution, on the co-operation with cash-servers, on automatic classification and on metadata aware tools and retrieval improvements.

Ingrid Melve: Web-Caching - Abstract

Based on experiments and experiences in the EC 4th Framework project DESIRE with Web caching systems this presentation gives guidelines and outlines strategies for building a functional Web caching system with cooperating Web caches. Some of the pitfalls and possibilities of building Web caching meshes are identified. The architecture of a Web caching mesh depends on the network topology and the cost factors of the network. The emphasis is on building Internet Service Provider (ISP) wide caching systems.

Frans Lettenström: Archival of Internet Documents - Abstract

Kulturarw3 (The Swedish W3 Archive) is a project at Kungliga biblioteket (National Library of Sweden). It aims at archiving information published on Internet from TLD .se and from generic TLDs considered to be Swedish. Information that is saved includes linked ("having a link to it from within Sweden") www pages (html documents) and other types of files (images, sound, videoclips etc). Usenet discussions in Swedish and lists distributed from Swedish servers will also be archived.

Joyce K. Reynolds: The Domain Name System - Past, Present, and Future - Abstract

This presentation will provide a brief history about host names and domain names and an overview of the Domain Name System (DNS). The current structure will be described, including current developments of gTLDs (global top level domains) and ccTLDs (country code top level domains). The plan of the International Ad Hoc Committee (IAHC) and its Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) will be discussed. The talk concludes with a look into the future for the DNS.

Yakov Rekhter: Tag Switching - Abstract

In this talk we present an overview of tag switching. We begin by presenting some of the driving factors behind tag switching. We look at some of the essential characteristics of tag switching. We briefly describe the two components of the tag switching architecture, forwarding and control, as well as the individual modules (e.g., destination-based routing, hierarchy of routing knowledge, multicast routing, etc...) that are contained within the control component.

Riitta Rinta-Filppula & Harri Salminen: Web University - Abstract

The Web University (WU) is based on the concept of a virtual university. The students and staff at the participating sites can communicate via the Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) and Internet network by using applications like email, World Wide Web (WWW) and multicast videoconferencing.

The Web University has started as a co-operative pilot project between CERN, CSC/FUNET and the Finnish universities. The International ATM connection has been provided by the JAMES project of the European PTOs and Finnish connections by FUNET. The Pilot project concentrates on transferring the latest results of high energy physics directly to universities. Physic researchers can update their knowledge by participating in the CERN seminars and experiments from their own workstations via a real time network based on ATM and Internet technology. Teaching is interactive and it is in principle targeting postgraduate students, but some courses in physics and information technology have been offered to undergraduate students.

Now that most technical issues have been solved it would be possible to extend the project to the other countries and subjects as well. The presentation will tell you about the latest results, ideas for future development and guidelines for participation.

Peter Sjödin: IPv6 - The next generation Internet Protocol - Abstract

This talk gives an overview of IP version 6 (IPv6), a new version of the Internet Protocol designed to cope with the growth of the Internet and to provide a platform for new internet functionality. The presentation describes basic mechanisms in IPv6 such as address auto-configuration, flow labelling and IPv4-to-IPv6 transition, as well as recent proposals in the area of address architecture and address assignment. SICS did one of the first implementations of IPv6, running in HP-UX, and maintains a backbone node on the 6bone, the experimental IPv6 testbed. The talk will summarize experiences gained from this practical work with IPv6.

Peter Villemoes: Nordic Update - Abstract

An overview of the Nordic networking developments since the Copenhagen conference in 1995 will be given. The growth has continued and shows no sign of slowing down. The impact of the European initiatives and the resurrection of research networking in the USA will be discussed. NORDUnet's role as provider of international connectivity will be described, and the benefits of the Nordic collaboration will be illustrated.

Stefan Westman: PTT and the Internet - Abstract

Networks in Europe and the world is growing at a progressive scale. PTTs are investing a large amount of money in bandwidth and new network technology. A lot of good ideas from the universities has proven to be good business for the market. e.g. Ebone, GIX, high bandwidth to U.S. etc. I will in my presentation argue that it is important that research results has a natural way to develop into business ideas thus implying a close cooperation between universities and PTTs.

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Internet Iceland Inc
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Last update 29.06.97