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The Wide Area Technical Report Service (WATERS) provides a distributed database of Computer Science technical reports which can be searched and browsed.
The WATERS project aims to speed up and increase sharing of information in the computer science field and to encourage technology transfer. Specific objectives are to:
Anyone on the Internet is a potential user. Users can browse lists of contributing sites, and then through those sites' lists of technical reports. Users can also search the global bibliographic database of reports, to obtain a short ASCII file giving citation and abstract information for each report. Finally, when allowed, users can read an online copy of a desired report and/or download a copy for local viewing and printing.
We presume each user has a client for the World-Wide Web (WWW). In many cases this will be a version of Mosaic, such as X Mosaic for UNIX workstations. With such a client, users can reap most of the benefits of the WATERS project.
If the user has a WWW client set up to launch viewers such as ghostview (for PostScript files), xdvi (for DVI files), and xtiff (for TIFF page images), then many of the online reports stored in WATERS can be read directly too.
If the user wishes to search for particular reports using keywords, there are gateways to the Wide Area Information Service (WAIS) available at the global WATERS server sites. However, we recommend that you compile FreeWAIS (available from CNIDR) with NCSA's Mosaic so that you can directly use the global WATERS WAIS servers instead of the more resource-demanding gateways. Please read about installing these tools.
Any department or other group that publishes a series of technical reports related to computer science is eligible to become a contributing site, and to be included in the list of contributing sites. It is only necessary to contact the WATERS team at waters@cs.odu.edu, to have your system administrator install appropriate software tools, and have your designated librarian use those tools to maintain a local technical report archive.
Contributing sites should read instructions about installing local server software. This process is relatively easy, and the WATERS team is eager to help anyone interested, so that ultimately all interested departments can participate. In addition to providing tools for users (see above), contributing sites will run the Techrep software to help automate the process of managing technical reports, and to produce a WWW browsable list of document citations and all available online report. This list and the documents are served out of a local ftp directory, so now WWW server is required.
WATERS was launched as a result of discussions at the 1992 Snowbird Conference for Computer Science Department Heads. The Computer Research Association encouraged this work, and the National Science Foundation provided seed money through a grant to ODU that funded efforts there and at SUNY Buffalo, UVA, and VPI&SU. For an overview of the system as it was originally proposed, please see the first WATERS technical report.
The original software involved the Techrep software developed at UVA, along with enhancements to WAIS developed at ODU. The current version is a second generation implementation that also makes use of WWW software. Ongoing development at the 4 original sites is benefiting from related work at NASA Langeley.
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