Summary: |
"AbstractThe Electronic News Service (ENS at http://www.connet.org/NS/Intl/) is an AltaVista-like service which is specialised for the construction industry. It has been developed as one of the services in the EC project CONNET (Construction Information Service Network, at http://www.connet.org/). The ENS provides a searchable index of the contents of Internet sites relevant to the built environment. The database containing the source set of Internet sites to index has information on over 14,300 Internet sites across the world, categorised and classified by several criteria. This base set of Internet sites is drawn from all major lists offered to the construction industry (e.g., Yahoo, EEVL, UK-BRP, etc) and from published sources (e.g., Architect's Journal, Building magazine, etc). Over 35 major lists of site sources are utilised to build, maintain, and grow this set of 14,300 resources for the construction industry.The ENS service provides all in the industry with a free method of identifying sources of information based on the content of a web page or service based classifications. Users are able to define profiles for news they have an interest in and to be periodically, and automatically, notified of new or modified web pages and sites which meet their criterion. Running the ENS within the CONNET network provides mechanisms to link together all news services, which are available, to provide answers to user requests across complimentary systems, or even to take requests established for news and use them to identify other information sources of relevance (e.g., publications, software, products).This paper will describe the ENS, the methods it uses to gather and index construction information across the world, and the services it offers to the construction industry. However, the main content of this paper will be an analysis of the references gathered from the 35 major lists of resources which are established across the world. This analysis looks at the overlap that exists between the Internet sites referred to by each of these lists (which is remarkably small), the particular biases which appear in the lists (mainly towards English language and USA-based information), the currency of the sites in the lists (quite poor), and the predicted coverage of total construction-based Internet resources found in all of these lists. Our analysis of the lists also shows a relatively small number of 'must have' sites, which are included in the majority of the lists operated around the world. These 'must have' sites are highlighted and analysed to provide an understanding of what makes these sites of such great importance to the whole industry." |