As networked information systems continue their explosive growth, an increasing number of sites are using indexing to help manage data both within an enterprise and across the Internet. The current generation of Web crawlers demonstrates the tremendous demand for these services, yet more efficient and powerful services could be built, given widely deployed standards for interoperable distributed indexing and searching.

This workshop will bring together a cross-section of people concerned with distributed indexing and searching, to explore areas of common concern where standards might be defined. We will focus particularly on repository interfaces that support efficient and powerful distributed indexing and searching, considering issues such as:

• Methods to reduce load placed on servers by Web crawlers and other indexing systems. For example, is the robots.txt standard adequate?
• Representations for cross-platform result ranking to support multi-engine search systems.
• Standards for collecting and publishing meta-data from enterprise resources. For example, should the Dublin metadata specification be added to HTML to improve the searchability of HTML documents?
• Architectures for distributed indexing. For example, Netscape is proposing the Harvest Summary Object Interchange Format (SOIF) as a standard, as evidenced by their recent decision to adopt SOIF into their product offerings. Does SOIF provide the proper interface between Web crawlers and search engines?
• Other issues that enterprises have with deploying intranet Web crawlers, which can be addressed by standards.

There will be a limit of 50 participants. Potential participants should submit 1 page long position papers to the workshop co-chairs; papers exceeding this length will be rejected. Based on the papers, we will ask a subset of participants to present brief talks during the first morning of the workshop. We will devote that afternoon to discussions of common concerns and technologies, and then focus the following day on determining concrete steps for defining relevant standards.

***POSITION PAPER DEADLINE HAS BEEN EXTENDED***

Position papers due: May 6, 1996 (previously was April 19, 1996)
Acceptance notifications: May 13, 1996 (previously was April 29, 1996)

Position Paper Note: To maximize time spent in interactive discussions, only a small number of attendees will make presentations. However, all position papers will be included on the workshop website.

Please submit your position papers as Web URLs by email to the Program Committee co-chairs:

Mic Bowman, Transarc Corporation
mic+@transarc.com

Michael Schwartz, @Home Network
schwartz@home.net

Note: Position papers will be hosted by the World Wide Web Consortium for 1 year following the workshop, so must be available for public dissemination.