CONCISE Status Report

Author: Andrew Colleran  (colleran@level-7.co.uk)
Date: 4 October 1993

This is a brief status report on CONCISE for the WG-ISUS meeting at
NSC '93 in Warsaw.

Current usage

The average monthly rate of access to CONCISE over the past 12 months
is 1600 interactive sessions and 300 email messages.  Users in a total
of 44 countries and 10 network domains have accessed the service.

Since telnet access directly to the service was introduced in the
summer, direct telnet access has been steadily growing, although the
already established telnet to X.29 gateways in Finland, Sweden and
Switzerland are still heavily used.

The importance of services offering gateways is also made clear by the
large number of accesses made via the UK national service NISS and ASK
in Germany.

There are nine SIGs and CEC projects using the remote information
provider tools; the most active are the Crystallographers, EDIRA and
Education 2000.

The RARE Secretariat has also been putting information on the service.

An enhanced CONCISE application has been implemented.  This provides a
mailback feature and a gateway to other services via, for example,
telnet or X.29.

An initial gopher service has been established providing access to the 
CONCISE information.

Future plans

Our focus, always with a European priority, will be on the following 
information areas:-

Information Servers
Mailing Lists
Directory User Agents
International networking conferences and seminars in Europe
European network providers (not for profit)
Special Interest Groups and European projects
RARE
International networking organisations 
Networked Resource Tools
Network Applications

On the technical side we shall extend the gopher service and
incorporate use of WAIS indexes. In addition, we shall evaluate how
to use such tools as the World Wide Web.

Andrew Colleran