The Dienst development group at Cornell has finished development of release
3.5 of the Dienst software. Dienst is a protocol and server for providing
distributed document servers over the World Wide Web. Dienst provides three
digital library services; repository services that store and deliver
multi-format documents, index servers that index meta-information on documents
and provide search engines over these indexes, and user interfaces services
that provide a human front-end to the two other services. Multiple Dienst
servers interoperate to provide a logically uniform collection to the user,
even though the physical collection is distributed. Each individual Dienst
server "knows" about other sites, and visa-versa, by periodically polling a
central meta-server site.
Documents served by Dienst are each identified by a universally unique document
identifier, or docid. This docid is partitioned into a publisher name and
number. Each document has, at a minimum, bibliographic information stored in a
tagged format. In addition, a document may have serveral other representation
formats (e.g., PostScript, HTML, TIFF, etc).
The new release includes a number of functional and performance enhancements
over previous versions including a new search engine, support for full-text
searching, gateways to other document indexes, and improved installation.
The Cornell server is available at http://cs-tr.cs.cornell.edu.
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Carl Lagoze
Senior Software Engineer
Computer Science Technical Report Project
Department of Computer Science
Cornell University
Ithaca, NY 14853
e-mail: cjl2@cornell.edu
phone: 607-255-5691
FAX: 607-255-4428