Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!shadooby!samsung!ginosko!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!zephyr.ens.tek.com!tekgen!robertj From: robertj@tekgen.BV.TEK.COM (Robert Jaquiss) Newsgroups: comp.ivideodisc,tek.misc Subject: SIGCAT (SPECIAL INTEREST GROUP ON CD-ROM APPLICATIONS AND TECHNOLOGY) RECAP Message-ID: <4998@tekgen.BV.TEK.COM> Date: 30 Oct 89 19:38:09 GMT Reply-To: robertj@tekgen.BV.TEK.COM (Robert Jaquiss) Followup-To: comp.ivideodisc Organization: Tektronix, Inc., Beaverton, OR. Lines: 349 I head the following material with an OCr machine. I have corrected some misread words. I apologize for any mis- takes. Robert S. Jaquiss Jr. robertj@tekgen.bv.tek.com -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- SIGCAT RECAP Special Interest Group on CD-ROM Applications & Technology Minutes of the June 28,1989 Meeting The meeting began with a tutorial on CD-ROM pubfish- ing workstations given by Timothy H. Hinds, President, In- tegrity Data Systems Corporation. Mr. Hinds described the functions, components, and methods of acquiring a CD- ROM workstation. The workstation functions range from data capture through the various "massaging" steps required to build and index the database to the actual creation of the CD-ROM image on tape or on some other medium that can be sent to a CD mastering facility. The components consist of a processor platform, some peripheral storage devices, an operating system, system support software, and application software for creating the CD-ROM image. The typical workstation consists of an AT bus 80386 processor plat- form, 4.64 megabytes of RAM, 1.2 gigabytes (billion bytes) of disk storage, a 6250 BPI nine-track tape drive, and MS- DOS. Such a workstation costs from $25,000 to $35,000. Mr. Hinds highly recommended that CD-ROM developers adhere to the ISO 9660 CD-ROM logical formatting stand- ard and that they only invest in workstation software capable of producing and supporting it For generic applications, he recommended that developers acquire package software with development tool kits for supporting unique require- ments. Workstation architecture should be "open"; that is, it should be well documented, adhere to industry standards, and be third-party accessible. Finally, Mr. Hinds warned not to underestimate the staff rcsources needed to install and operate a workstation. If necessary, consider hiring a con- sultant or other outside help for developing requirements, integrating components, and &"g the in-house staff. For further information, contact: Mr. Timothy Hinds, President Integrity Information Systems, Inc. 3011 Teak Lane Bowie, MD 20715 (301)464-7330. Dr. Carl Abston, Chief of the Systems Integration and Planning Office of the National Geophysical Data Center (NGDC), presented the latest NOAA CD-ROM entitled "Geophysics of North America." NGDC is distributing the definitive databases on North American geophysics in a machine with EGA graphics capability and a CD-ROM reader. The data, consisting of magnetic, gravity, ther- modynamic, 30-second topography, and other information, is stored in 630 files that collectively take up 588 million bytes. No compression is used, and the data are replicated in different forms such as ASCII, binary, and raster images. The CD-ROM disc, including software and documentation, costs $600 for the first copy. An organization can purchase additional copies for $200 each. Dr. Abston conducted a tour of the disc, starting with a topographic map of the southern California coast with elevations shown in color. He added the coast, county lines, and 20-meter contours. He also produced a cross section. Washington State was next, including Puget Sound and the Mount St. Helen's area. Dr. Abston concluded by stating that the disc contains just data. There is no analysis, and the software comes on a separate floppy disc. For further infor- mation, contact: Dr. Carl C. Abston Chief, Systems Integraton and Planning Office National Geophysical Data Center 325 Broadway Bolder, CO 80303 Telephone: (303) 497-6276 FrS: 320-6276 FAX: (303) 497-6513 Telex: 592811 NOAA MASC BDR The next speaker was Mr. Stephen R. Macdonald of Patent Search Systems, Inc. (PSSI). PSSI has developed a system for searching the massive U.S. Patent Library database on CD-ROM. Since 1971 alone, about 1.2 million patents have been granted and have generated over 10 mil- lion pages of graphics and text. To accommodate it, PSSI has made a 240 disc 'carousel' the heart of the system. The rest of the hardware is an AT-compatible machine with a high-resolution monitor capable of displaying both text and drawings. The original documents, both text and illustra- tions, were scanned into machine-readable form and run through image compression software to reduce the size of the data. "carousel" is connected to a single PC/AT and provides ac- cess to data on any given disc in about 12 seconds. The retrieval software is by Dataware, and the access points for the database are assignee code, patent count, and assignee name. The patent database is updated weekly when the new patents are released. The U.S. Patent Library Workstation is a multiple-use system, and the "carousel" can be programmed to hold other databases as well. For further in- formation, call or write: Mr. Stephen R. Macdonald, Vice President Patent Search Systems, Inc. 2001 Jefferson Davis Highway Crystal Plm One, Suite 802 Arlington, VA 22202 Phone: (703) 521-9030 The next speaker was Fred Meyer, President of Meridian Data, Inc. Meridian Data has just opened an office in Res- ton, Va., to service CD-ROM developers in the Washington, D.C., area. According to Mr. Meyer, the D.C. area does as much CD-ROM development as Europe and Japan com- bined. Meridian Data is committed to building this industry's infrastructure, and wants to hear the needs of the Federal sector for future product development Meridian Data supports existing CD-ROM standards, is working with Microsoft and UNIX standards makers to extend the scope of standards, and will stay current with the state of the art as this dynamic technology continues to change. Mr. Meyer then announced Meridian Data's newest product the CD Professional, which allows a user to actual- ly create a CD-ROM disc in house, "while you wait." The growth of in-house CD-ROM product development now dominates the industry. Meridian Data's original product for the CD-ROM industry was CD Publisher, which first made possible in-house product development. Most CD- ROM retrieval software was developed by using CD Publisher. Meridian followed up by releasing CD Master and CD NeL Using a write-one-time-only CD-ROM disc, CD Publisher lets the user create a complete, finished, ISO 9660 format CD-ROM disc that is stable in a normal office environment. The bIM discs can be purchased in quantity for about $100 each and have a 5-year shelf life. The CD Professional can be used for prototyping new applications, as an in-house service bureau, for small-run production, or for high-security applications. Inquiries should be directed to: Mr. Greg Smith, Director of Sales Meridian Data, Inc. 5615 Scotts Valley Drive Scotts Valley, CA 95066 Phone: (408) 438-3100 Fax: (408) 438-6816 Telex: 988330 CDROM OR Mr. Matt Leek, Eastern Area Sales Manager 12200 Sunrise Valley Drive, Suite 125 Reston, VA 22091 Phone: (703) 620-4200 Fax: (703) 620-5100 After lunch, Ms. Susan David announced up coming ac- tivities of SIGLIT, the Special Interest Group on Library and Information Technology. SIGLIT is a SIGCAT working group that focuses on library applications of CD-ROM tech- nology. On July 12, SIGLIT will visit the Howard County Central Library to see their Novell local area network, to which they have added six CD-ROM workstations. On August 15, SIGLIT will meet in room LM-215 of the Library of Congress to hear conference reports from area librarians who have recently attended professional con- ferences. SIGLIT is also involved in promoting the ISO 9660 standard for CD-ROM and is interested in hearing about any user problems with it For further details, contact Ms. Susan David at (202) 707-7169. The distinction of making the day's most unusual presen- tation went to Cliff Mass of the University of Washington. Not being able to make the trip in person, Dr. Mass sent a videotape of his presentation, which was projected on a screen at the front of the auditorium. Dr. Mass, a meteorologist, described the past and current projects that have created CD-ROM's containing large meteorological databases: the National Meteorological Center Grid Point Data (NMC) disc, the Genesis of Atlantic Lows Experiment (GAILE) CD-ROM, and the World Weather Disc. Dr. Mass also demonstrated that his CD-ROM's can work on Sun and MicroVAX workstations as well as PC's and Apple Macin- toshes. Other CD-ROM titles currently under development include Stratosphere-Troposphere Exchange Data, the Voyager Data Set from Jet Propulsion Labratory, and the Geomagnetic and Ionospheric Data of the U.S. Geological Survey. For additional information, call or write: Professor Cliff Mass Department of Atmospheric Science, AK-40 University of Washington Seattle, WA 98195 Phone: (206) 545-0910 CD-ROM can be used for other purposes besides the mere distribution of data. The next speaker, John Garofolo of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), formerly the National Bureau of Standards, showed just how flexible CD-ROM can be. For some time, NIST has been distributing digitized speech databases on mag- netic tape. However, this medium has undesirable integrity and storage density characteristics. NIST has decided to use CD-ROM to distribute TIMIT, a speech database, to the speech research community. TIMIT gives examples of the different dialects of English spoken around the United States. It provides straight data for speech analysis and is directed to a wide audience of speech researchers. The data can be used as input for spectral analysis and other analyses. TINUT consists of 6300 sentences in 18,900 files. The occupies 430 million bytes on a single CD-ROM disc. The files are organized into 4200 hierarchical directories, which are visually navigable. The CD-ROM disc is in the ISO 9660 format and is being used around the world on IBM PC's, Apple Macintoshes, and Sun workstations. To demonstrate TINUT, Mr. Garofolo conducted a dialect tour of the United States, producing examples of New England, nonhem, north midland, south midland, southern, New York City, western, and "army brat" speech. For further in- formation, or if you are a speech researcher and wish to ob- tain a copy of TINUT, contact: Mr. John Garofolo, Computer Scientist National Institute of Standards and Technology Bldg 225 Room A-216 Gaithersburg, MD 20899 Phone: (301) 975-3193 Sherman Woo, of the U.S. West Advanced Technologies Group, presented the "Electronic Yellow Pages" CD-ROM, a prototype application developed in cooperation with the Microsoft Corporation and containing the 39 separate Yel- low Page directories published by U.S. West in the State of Colorado. It is searchable by heading, brand name, com- pany name, and geographic area. It is also a multimedia disc containing text, graphics, photographs, sound, and anima- tion. As such, "Electronic Yellow Pages" is designed to show the different ways information can be stored and dis- played on CD-ROM and the impact that these methods will have on the future of electronic advertising. 'Electronic Yellow Pages" requires an IBM PC/AT with a Paradise VGA Plus board and Nccrosoft Windows as a minimum platform. Mr. Woo stated that the amount of memory provided for images and pixel storage are crucial for suc- cessfully synchronizing sound and video. A video sequence requires at least a one-million-byte. Mr. Woo also said that CD-ROM/XA will provide the solution to buffering in multimedia CD-ROM. For further information, contact: Mr. Sherman Woo U.S. WEST Advanced Technologies 612 N. 47th Seattle, WA 98013 (206) 646-74% Next, Mr. Mark Foster, president of Quanta Press, Inc., spoke on 'How to Get Out of CD-ROM, or to Get in Cor- recity.' Quanta Press is a 4-month old CD-ROM publish- ing company that has already released six discs, with more on the way. Mr. Foster said that the first step for getting in correctly is to go with a 'Cadillac' system (that is, the best you can afford). If you cannot afford to buy one, lease it. Quanta Press endorses a 'cottage industry' approach to CD- ROM development. It will lease the necessary equipment to developers and guarantee them a minimum amount of work. Quanta Press also offers a finders fee for databases that it can publish. The fee is a perceptage of the net income products so far. Quanta Press also provides a marketing network for the databases that it publishes that includes Radio Shack and other mass marketers. To date, Quanta Press has published the following tides: "Shareware Gold"; 'RBBS Bulletin Board on a Disc", the definitive BBS CD- ROM; "CIA World Fact Book"; "U.S. Civics/How to Be a U.S. Citizen"; "Wheeler Clip Art," a compendium of graphic images for desktop publishers; and "Federal Seals and Logos." Mr. Foster concluded his talk by making a non-announcement" He asked members of the audience to send him letters if they could use a $300 CD-ROM drive. Send your response to: Mr. Mark Foster, President Quanta Press, Inc. 2239 Carter Avenue Suite 205 St. Paul, MN 55108 Phone: (612) 641-0714 The last speaker on the program was Mr. John Sands, Technical Operations Manager of Nimbus Information Sys- tems, Inc., a CD-ROM mastering and replication company and a subsidiary of Nimbus Records. Mr. Sands presented an overview, with slides, of Nimbus' mastering facility, one of the most advanced in the country. This plant features automated quality control that starts with a digital tape analyzer reading an incoming data tape and applying a cyclic redundancy check analysis of all errors. Proprietary mastering equipment is used to create the master disc image. Although the cost of reproducing the discs is only about $2.00 each, discs are metalized one at a time. According to Nimbus, this process is slower but more reliable than batch metalizing. Quality control of the reproduced discs is maintained by checking each and every byte against the original rotating image. For those who wish to check the quality of CD-ROM's that they have already purchased, Mr. Sands offered a procedure that involves making a binary copy of the files on a CD-ROM to a null device by using the MS-DOS copy command. Allow about 1 1/2 hours per CD- ROM. Although this procedure tells you only whether or not there are any hard errors on the disc, but it is better than no check at all. To obtain a copy of the Nimbus Block Access Test Pro- cedure, please contact: Mr. John L. Sands Technical Operations Manager Nimbus Information Systems Charlottesville, VA Phone: (804) 985-1 100 Hotline: (800) 782-0778 Mr. Larry Boden, marketing vice president of Nimbus Informattion Systems, offered some thoughts on what to con- sider for higher density CD-ROM. Potential users should evaluate the following factors: (1) Is it downwardly compatible *** missing text *** (3) Is there any change in the molding process? (There should be none.) (4) Does it conform to an industry standard? (There are none yet for hi density CD-ROM.) Larry can be reached at the same address as John Sands.