GILS breathes new life into Web

The Defense Technical Information Center (DTIC) has put a real live, breathing Government Information Locator Service on the Internet, and the center's GILS server is apparently being considered as a de facto standard for other agencies who want to bring their own GILS online. Point your browser t

The Defense Technical Information Center (DTIC) has put a real live, breathing Government Information Locator Service on the Internet, and the center's GILS server is apparently being considered as a de facto standard for other agencies who want to bring their own GILS on-line.

Point your browser to http://www.dtic.mil/defenselink/locator/, and you'll find an easy-to-use GILS. GILS provides one-stop shopping for those who want to get a good picture of the publicly available documents offered by an agency.

The DTIC GILS Website allows users to search a database by keyword to find publicly available Defense Department information.

Federal Networking Council

Chartered by the National Science and Technology Council's Committee on Information and Communication, the Federal Networking Council works to develop federal agency collaborations relating to high-speed networks. Point your browser to http://www.fnc.gov.

Documents offered on the FNC Web page include plans for interconnecting federal research and education networks and a paper proposing a federal Internet security plan. Also, the FNC has posted a resolution defining the term "Internet." The FNC released a report last September called "Federal Internet Security Plan" and will hold a two-day conference on Internet security this spring.

Spinning Concentric Webs

One of the biggest, if not the biggest, presences on the Web is NASA. With centers and sites spread around the world, the space agency faces the formidable task of maintaining some sense of coordination and consistency among the countless NASA-sponsored Web pages. Other agencies that are trying to coordinate agencywide Web publishing might take a page from NASA's site.

As you might imagine, the creators of the many NASA Web pages do not move in lock step. However, NASA Webmasters have constructed a number of organizations to support NASA World Wide Web server use throughout the agency. Style issues and guidelines for publishing agency information on the World Wide Web are two of the topics you can read about on the NASA Webmasters page at http://www.larc.nasa/webmasters/.