As posted to C.O.L.A.
ROADS version 2.1
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http://www.roads.lut.ac.uk
WHAT IS THIS ?
ROADS is a collection of tools for use in building on-line catalogues.
It's written in Perl and distributed as 'Open Source' software under
the standard Perl terms and conditions.
This is a maintenance release gathering together the bug fixes
produced since the previous 2.00 release in September.
Key features of the ROADS package are :-
. Available as an RPM for one-line installation on RedHat Linux!
. Simple text based resource description format
. World-Wide Web forms based resource description editor
. WWW and WHOIS++ based (MetaCrawler style) search capability
. Automatic generation of customised views of the catalogue,
e.g. breakdowns by subject category
. Automatic generation of listings of recently added resources
. Dynamic browsing of resources in particular subject categories
. Highly customizable HTML output with CSS stylesheet support
. Distributed indexing and searching across multiple WHOIS++
servers using the IETF's Common Indexing Protocol (centroids)
. Limited support for indexing and searching Harvest and Z39.50
. Tested for Year 2000 compliance according to the British
Standards Institute's Y2K check list
It also features a number of WWW based database admin tools, e.g.
. Index maintenance
. Removing/archiving old resource descriptions
. Overall installation consistency checking
. Resource description consistency checking
. Review date checking
. Checking for broken links (dangling URLs)
. Checking for duplicate URLs
. Checking for URL currency, e.g. records which have (not) been
changed recently
Most of these tools can be used independently of each other. You
could choose, for example, not to support searching via WHOIS++ - or
not to generate subject category breakdowns of your resource
descriptions. However, all of the tools are written to manipulate
their data in the simple text based IAFA template format.
Here are some examples of existing services using ROADS:
ADAM: - Art, Design & Media
Alex: - Electronic Texts
Biz/ed: - Business & Economics
History: - History
OMNI: - Health & Medicine
SOSIG: - Social Sciences
Merry Xmas and Happy Solstice :-)
Martin Hamilton
&
Jon Knight