Subject: Chemistry WWW home pages

From: [email-masked] (Thomas Bally)
Date: Fri, 27 Jan 1995 10:01:24 +0100

Dear Netters,

  I think the ongoing discussion about Chemistry WWW home pages touches on
  some rather fundamental issues of communication such as they emerge in the
  wake of the new technologies which have come upon us in the past few years
  and I strongly disagree with those who say that it is "just silly".

  Now that anyone with access to the Internet has potentially enormous amounts
  of information literally at his fingertips, the usefulness of this depends
  largely on how it is structured. WWW does not solve this problem for us, in
  the worst of cases it just sends us spinning around in Hypercircles while
  abusing bandwidth to make links to servers all over the world, each of which
  of course greets us with a pretty picture of several hundred kB.

  Coming to the question of Chemistry WWW home pages, I think what we should
  strive for is subdivision of the task, i.e. each country (perhaps each state
  in the US) should designate a site which maintains links to all WWW home pages
  of Chemistry Departments in that country (state), and which in turn offers
  links to the Chemistry home pages of all other countries. What UCLA has now
  is very nice, but if this list becomes as comprehensive as it should it will
  be impossible to use in its present form. Also, no single institution can be
  burdened with the task of maintaining and updating links to Chemistry WWW
  home pages all over the world.

  I think what will happen if the Chemistry community proves unable to provide
  some structure to these home page directories, some commercial enterprise
  will do it and then we will have to pay in order to get access to reliable
  information which might as well be free. Is this what you guys who think
  that the whole debate is silly have in mind?

  Apart from that I agree with Steve Bachrach that the quality of the infor-
  mation offered on many WWW sites leaves a *lot* to be desired. Perhaps we
  need to wait a little longer for the dust to settle as many colleagues
  are still busy "constructing* their WWW pages, but I would advocate that
  some minimal standards be published which say what information should be
  contained in these (such as e-mail addresses and phone numbers of *all*
  faculty) for the benefit of those who start out in this business.

  thomas

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|  Prof. Thomas Bally                 |  E-mail:  [email-masked]   |
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From: [email-masked] (Toni Kazic)
Date: Fri, 27 Jan 1995 11:50:55 -0600

Dear Netters,

I have been following the discussion of Web pages with much interest and
would like to offer some comments.  I strongly agree that it merits
discussion.

1.  I think the idea that a single (or country-specific) HTML page(s) with
links is required to prevent confusion is missing the boat slightly.  I
suggest it would be more useful to have a database of URNs with additional
information in fields as to type and nature of data.  The database itself
need not exist in a single physical location, but would also be distributed
over the net (otherwise, the access times would be even longer than when
everyone had the NCSA Mosaic page as their Mosaic default!).  Declaring a
site to the database could be done in a single-line email message.  This
suggestion has deliberate resemblances to the planned evolution of the Web
and its pointers to logical addressing of the name space.  As individuals
move from one institution to the other, the accession address (i.e. URL) is
likely to change, but the URN (the logical address) would not --- except in
the database storing the (URN,URL) tuple.  One could set up such a database
for chemistry web pages, and make the database accessible at several sites,
as a temporary measure until Nirvana strikes (and as a way of experimenting
with approaches to the issues of point 2).

2.  The quality issue has several sides.  One strength of the Web is its
unrefeered nature, which has resulted in an enormous explosion.  Vetting by
a committee would probably inhibit this.  On the other hand, there is a
real need for quality sources on the Web in addition to the free-for-all.
These are not mutually inimicable goals, however.  Everyone contributes
their cystallographic coordinates to Brookhaven or Cambridge, but those
sites have a significant investment of funds and staff devoted to
maintaining the site (your taxes at work).  I strongly believe that many
databases need to evolve towards electronic entry by the community with
curatorial maintenance by a staff and quality decisions made by peer
review.  This is essentially the paper-based model we have now, in terms of
publication processing.  But all of this requires resources.  As someone
who offers some material to the Web on essentially no resources, I can say
it is not a trivial task to keep data flowing in ways consistent with our
scientific goals and to actually mount the Web pages.  Even more, it
requires community support to serve on the necesary review panels.  I am
not sure how much time many have for the latter --- we had a real set of
howlers on Klotho for a while which no one wrote me about, yet (some)
people glanced at those particular pages.  [I treasure those who have taken
the time to talk with me, and welcome all comers.]  But until sufficient
academic and professional prestige is invested in such activities, I think
there will be little support for community quality maintenance ---
otherwise we will all always, highly justifiably, be too busy.

3.  Anyone who has used WAIS to search the Web knows how easy it is to get
useless, patently silly answers.  There is a solid set of computer
science/database/artificial intelligence issues there, to which people who
are not designated CSers can make an enormous contribution  ---  in large
part because they understand the uses of language in their particular
domain much better than a nonspecialist.  Perhaps we should start a
subdiscussion on access methodologies (or perhaps there is a newsgroup
somewhere which already does this, I don't know).

Toni Kazic
Institute for Biomedical Computing
Washington University