The C-ODA project
Peter T. Kirstein, Goli Montasser-Kohsari · Communications of the ACM · 1996
LECTRONIC access to large bodies of information such as journal articles is a comparatively new facility.As such, it raises many different areas of concern, such as:• The technology used in data preparation, data searching, and data retrieval; • The formats used in data storage;• The facilities the users desire or require; • The legitimate concerns of the publishers and the service providers to maintain an acceptable revenue stream;• The legal aspects of the provision of appropriate electronic systems.It is possible to discuss these problems at length from an abstract viewpoint.It is easy to mount small experiments with small sets of users and collections of documents; these are invaluable to establish the size of databases that might arise from a large collection, the legibility of different forms of data presentation, or even the ease with which users can absorb information electronically.However, to have a real impact on the potential and utility of electronic access to journal articles, it is essential to do pilot projects with large bodies of information.There is a considerable body of recent work in this area, most of which is concerned with specialized document collections, which have been put together for other purposes or even specifically for studying the problems involved.An example of this is the Dienst system [1] from the Cornell University Department of Computer Science.The Dienst project is part of a whole program funded by ARPA; a number of universities are involved, and most of the system is based around documents for which there are no copyright problems, and where the collection was built up in digital form.The Dienst project is designed to access a distributed document collection, and is a logical follow-on from the project we describe here.That project is to develop the distributed search facilities, P e t e r K i r s t e i n a n d G o l i M o n t a s s e r -K o h s a r iExperiences in setting up, organizing, and searching a large database of articles in several compound document forms are described.