Details of Grant 

EPSRC Reference:	GR/K34863/01
Title:	ROPA: BUILDING RESPONSIVE & AVAILABLE INFORMATION DISCOVERY AND REPOSITORY SERVICES
Principal Investigator:	Shrivastava, Professor S
Other Investigators:
Researcher Co-Investigators:
Project Partners:
Department:	Computing Sciences
Organisation:	Newcastle University
Scheme:	ROPA
Starts:	01 August 1994	Ends:	31 July 1996	Value (£):	156,645
EPSRC Research Topic Classifications:	Networks & Distributed Systems
EPSRC Industrial Sector Classifications:
Related Grants:
Panel History:
Summary on Grant Application Form
The main objective is to develop the infrastructure necessary for the construction of available and responsive information repositories that provide information storage, retrieval, searching, discovering and indexing services by co-operating with other servers scattered over the Internet. To get wider user acceptance, we intend to build these services as much as possible out of exiting facilities (e.g. the World-Wide Web).Progress:The advent of the World-Wide Web and the other similar systems has provided a significant step forward for networked information provision and has been successful in triggering the imaginations of computer users from many different professions. However, the Web is still very much a developing technology and in its current incarnation still suffers from a number of weaknesses. These have been investigated, and work on defining the architecture of networked information services has been initiated. The existing infrastructure used by the World-Wide Web must be extended if it is to continue to scale in numbers of users, offer bandwidth guarantees, and support new classes of networks applications. A number of facilities are necessary for the construction of available and responsive services that provide information storage, retrieval, searching, discovery and indexing capabilities by co-operating with other servers. We also envisage the provision of notification services that enable servers to discard or update out-of date information (such as rebinding hyperlinks if some object has moved, obtaining a fresh copy of a replica). The use of atomic transactions will be necessary for making changes to important configuration information. The project is in its initial phase, and the above issues are being investigated.
Key Findings
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Potential use in non-academic contexts
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Impacts
Description This information can now be found on Gateway to Research (GtR) http://gtr.rcuk.ac.uk Summary Date Materialised
Sectors submitted by the Researcher
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Project URL:
Further Information:
Organisation Website:	http://www.ncl.ac.uk