Office of Electronic Commerce in Scientific and Engineering
Data
Technical Highlights
- The Physics Laboratory Mosaic Server. The ECSED Office established
for the Physics Laboratory a World Wide Web Mosaic server to provide
information and data to U.S. industry and the general public over the
internet. This server has been accessible to the public since June 20,
1994 and by the end of the calendar year, 2,100 distinct computers (some with
very many users) had made 15,000 accesses to its documents. The rate of use
continues to increase rapidly.
A wide range of information is provided on the PL WWW server. It ranges from
staff and organization information to PL technical activities, publication
lists, research facilities, physical reference data, and bibliographic
information about physical reference data. New information is added regularly.
We develop programs to provide this information and innovations to overcome
the limitations of current Mosaic browsers (e.g., we generated subscripts and
superscripts by means of graphics before these features were incorporated into
Mosaic).
For internet users who want to access the PL WWW server, the internet URL for
the PL WWW server is http://physics.nist.gov/.
- Electronic Commerce in Scientific and Engineering Data. This
Office, in cooperation with NIPDE, initiated an effort to establish a
capability for U.S. industry to effectively utilize scientific, engineering,
technical, codes/standards, and related regulatory information. A group of
participants representing industry, various government agencies, and several
NIST Laboratories participated in a workshop, held in Gaithersburg on
April 25, 1994, aimed at establishing a capability in ECSED. The team
defined what it considered a high-level capability in ECSED and developed a
plan to create an electronic marketplace that will allow participants to
efficiently locate, access, protect, contribute, and pay for scientific,
engineering, and regulatory information. This information will be provided in
open formats and computer-sensible form along with specification of the
quality and security of the provided information. The team separated the
high-level capability into its elemental parts and defined each of them. Then
the current status of each was determined. A preliminary report on this work
is available on the NIPDE WWW server (which may be reached from the ECSED
Office listing on the PL WWW server).
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