Future directions

Our technical agenda remains much as it was six months ago . We have refined our ideas of what support tools are necessary, and added many more. We have also identified that effort must be spent in the areas of:-
Service Mode
As the web grows, the "librarian" job of insuring the integrity and availability of the data becomes more important. Our philosophy to date has been to provide only the software infrastructure: can we avoid this. See details .
External liason
If we continue to allow the project to spread outside the bounds of CERN, this takes time;
User contact
To date our contact with HEP users has been insufficient. We must examine more closely how we can be of direct use to HEP groups. Of course, generic developments have a higher payoff that user-cusomised developments, so we will be biased toward groups with common needs, or who show a lot of enthusiasm.
Format conversion tools
We intend to provide the framework for documents to be exchanged in many formats, with conversionas necessary. (This feature will also allow the automatic opening of X-window or telnet sessions to programs on servers). A result of this feature will be that we start to be concerened with format conversion programs, as our system will depend on them. This suggests we should join forces with those expert(s) in CERN in text markup conversion.
More...

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Tim BL