"Sherlock" plugin channel for Chemistry sites
Over the last year, we have seen a lot of activity in the area of "portals", or starting places for searching the internet (assuming its worth doing this!). One approach has been the development of "channels", or collections of grouped search sites which provide "one stop" searches. One particular implementation on the platform I do a lot of work on is called Sherlock. This is a system level "find" interface which can be easily configured using little files called Sherlock Plug-ins. Our site for example is via http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/chemime/chemdig/chemdig.src.hqx By dropping this onto one's system, one can then go to the "chemistry channel" (actually, only with MacOS 9) and when a search term is specified, all sites in this channel can be searched simultaneously if desired, or groups of sites can be selected. The search results are all returned to your computer. It struck me therefore that it might be worthwhile to persuade all the major sites which support search facilities and have significant chemical content, to group together to form such a "chemistry" search channel. Perhaps there are others out there already? If not, I donate the one above to this inaugural collection! The above is a MacOS solution only. In fact, there are many other such aggregators, ie http://winfiles.cnet.com/apps/nt/webtools-search.html One we use (Copernic) is supported on both MacOS and Windows. Clearly, the field is developing rapidly, although presumably to promote e-commerce. In this mad rush to make money on the Internet, specialised fields such as Chemistry might get bypassed! To succeed, I suspect we all have to cooperate with eachother! If anyone out there has or wishes to develop a Sherlock plug to get the ball rolling, do let this list (or me) know. If there is demand, we could set up a site to collect all the plugins and then create our own chemistry channel! If anyone knows that this has already been done then again do let us See http://developer.apple.com/macos/sherlock.html for more details. Henry Rzepa. +44 171 594 5774 (Office) +44 171 594 5804 (Fax) Dept. Chemistry, Imperial College, London, SW7 2AY, UK. http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/rzepa/ chemweb: A list for Chemical Applications of the Internet. To post to list: mailto:chemweb@ic.ac.uk Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/chemweb/ To (un)subscribe, mailto:majordomo@ic.ac.uk the following message; (un)subscribe chemweb List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (mailto:rzepa@ic.ac.uk)
On Mon, Dec 06, 1999 at 02:19:00PM +0000, Rzepa, Henry wrote:
Over the last year, we have seen a lot of activity in the area of "portals", or starting places for searching the internet (assuming its worth doing this!).
One approach has been the development of "channels", or collections of grouped search sites which provide "one stop" searches.
One particular implementation on the platform I do a lot of work on is called Sherlock. This is a system level "find" interface which can be easily configured using little files called Sherlock Plug-ins. Our site for example is via http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/chemime/chemdig/chemdig.src.hqx By dropping this onto one's system, one can then go to the "chemistry channel" (actually, only with MacOS 9) and when a search term is specified, all sites in this channel can be searched simultaneously if desired, or groups of sites can be selected. The search results are all returned to your computer.
It struck me therefore that it might be worthwhile to persuade all the major sites which support search facilities and have significant chemical content, to group together to form such a "chemistry" search channel. Perhaps there are others out there already? If not, I donate the one above to this inaugural collection!
The above is a MacOS solution only. In fact, there are many other such aggregators, ie http://winfiles.cnet.com/apps/nt/webtools-search.html
One we use (Copernic) is supported on both MacOS and Windows. Clearly, the field is developing rapidly, although presumably to promote e-commerce. In this mad rush to make money on the Internet, specialised fields such as Chemistry might get bypassed! To succeed, I suspect we all have to cooperate with eachother!
If anyone out there has or wishes to develop a Sherlock plug to get the ball rolling, do let this list (or me) know. If there is demand, we could set up a site to collect all the plugins and then create our own chemistry channel! If anyone knows that this has already been done then again do let us
See http://developer.apple.com/macos/sherlock.html for more details.
Henry Rzepa. +44 171 594 5774 (Office) +44 171 594 5804 (Fax) Dept. Chemistry, Imperial College, London, SW7 2AY, UK. http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/rzepa/
Much as I appreciate Henry's love of the Mac - I'm using one right now, although at home - I do think the solution to his problem must be platform independent including working on unix machines - linux and others, as well as PC and Mac. Is there any possibility of this? Regards, Brian. -- Associate Professor Brian Salter-Duke (Brian Duke) b_duke@lacebark.ntu.edu.au School of Biological, Environmental and Chemical Sciences, SITE, Northern Territory University, Darwin, NT 0909, Australia. Phone 08-89466702. Fax 08-89466847 http://www.smps.ntu.edu.au/school/compchem.html chemweb: A list for Chemical Applications of the Internet. To post to list: mailto:chemweb@ic.ac.uk Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/chemweb/ To (un)subscribe, mailto:majordomo@ic.ac.uk the following message; (un)subscribe chemweb List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (mailto:rzepa@ic.ac.uk)
Brian Salter-Duke wrote;
Much as I appreciate Henry's love of the Mac - I'm using one right now, although at home - I do think the solution to his problem must be platform independent including working on unix machines - linux and others, as well as PC and Mac. Is there any possibility of this?
We make progress. I have found that http://www.traquent.com/ provide a multi-search engine for Windows Machines , which is fully compatible with Sherlock plug-ins. Now we just have to solve the unix problem. With Alan Arnold's plugin http://metachem.ch.adfa.edu.au/metachem/sherlock/MetaChem.src.hqx we now have a "channel". Its pretty trival to reverse engineer these things for other sites (I have done about 4 now). If anyone else wishes to try making one for their own site/institute/organisation, please send them along! Meanwhile, we should look out for other cross platform solutions. In turn, it should be pretty simple to convert one type of plugin to another. Meanwhile, I quote a posting from Sean Luke, on another forum. Clearly, something like Sherlock has a long way to evolve yet! ============================================= "There are a few languages on the horizon that may be of interest, but they're not in general use yet. - RDF is a semantic network language developed for this purpose. It's an XML application (a language "written in XML"). It started life as the MCF project at Apple. W3C is behind its design, and it has a lot of big boys behind it. Which is ironic, because it's basically very poorly implemented. Its syntax is convoluted, its semantics are too simple for anything but very basic use, and its model (semantic networks) is too simplistic in my opinion. See http://www.w3.org/RDF/ - SHOE is a research language with much more powerful semantics than RDF, and which is easier to use and with a simpler syntax. RDF has of late been borrowing a lot of stuff from SHOE, especially the symbol-resolution mechanisms. SHOE comes both as an SGML application (a superset of HTML) and as an XML application, pick your poison. I should come clean and say that I invented SHOE a few years back, though it's in the hands of other researchers now. See http://www.cs.umd.edu/projects/plus/SHOE/ - DAML is a recent DARPA initiative for designing a standardized knowledge-representation language for web pages and agent interaction. See http://www.darpa.mil/baa/#iso and look at the "Agent Based Computing" section. DAML is citing SHOE and RDF as its two big proto-examples." -- Henry Rzepa. +44 171 594 5774 (Office) +44 171 594 5804 (Fax) Dept. Chemistry, Imperial College, London, SW7 2AY, UK. http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/rzepa/ chemweb: A list for Chemical Applications of the Internet. To post to list: mailto:chemweb@ic.ac.uk Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/chemweb/ To (un)subscribe, mailto:majordomo@ic.ac.uk the following message; (un)subscribe chemweb List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (mailto:rzepa@ic.ac.uk)
participants (2)
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Brian Salter-Duke
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Rzepa, Henry