ASF 1.1b   October 30, 1998

		


Release 1.1b of the Advanced Search Facility (ASF) freeware is
now available at the ASF home page <>. 
ASF is an implementation of a system designed to create locator records,
support searching of the locator records for information  or searching
original documents and supporting the development of information communities
through sharing of locator records.

The software components include:

	o Crawler
	o Locator Record Generator
	o Indexer
	o HTTP server
	o Search Engine
	o Z39.50 server
	o Control Structure

This release has updated versions of nearly all of the software
components and some significant functional enhancements. This release
is a developmental release which has known bugs (see partial list below). 
The first beta quality release anticipated to be capable
of sustaining significant use will be version 1.4.0.

The distribution contains:

	o all the source code
	o sample crawl
	o sample crawl scenario
	o sample files lists
	o sample database
	o sample GILS prototypes
	o sample raw GILS records


Authors

	ASF is intended to be a framework that will allow search components from
	many vendors to interoperate. This ASF freeware is the result of the hard
	work of many individuals. In particular this distribution incorporates:

		o Apache HTTP Server (http:///www.apache.org/)
		o PAVUK web crawler  (http://www.idata.sk/~ondrej/pavuk/)
		o Isearch            (http://http://www.cnidr.org/ir/isearch.html/)
				     (http://www.etymon.com/Isearch/)
				     (ftp://www.awcubed.com/Software/)
		o YAZ-ZAP-Z39.50     (http://www.indexdata.dk/)
		o libemerge	     (http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/People/futrelle/)
	        o structure	     (http://www.islandedge.com/)
		o General            (http://www.fsf.org/)
				     (http://www.redhat.com)
				     (http://www.usgs.gov)