--- Begin Forwarded Message --- Date: Wed, 14 Feb 2001 17:50:40 -0700 From: Bill Thoen <[log in to unmask]> Subject: SUMMARY: "Deep web" and "Invisible web" sites for GIS? Sender: Bill Thoen <[log in to unmask]> Last week or so I asked for help in locating "Deep Web" or "Invisible Web" sites of interest to GIS and mapping people. Responses were light, but there were some good ones. First of all, for anyone who wants to know more about what the deep web is and why the big search engines can index only about 1/500 of the content that's out there, see Bright Planet's white paper on the subject, "The Deep Web: Surfacing Hidden Value" at http://www.completeplanet.com/Tutorials/DeepWeb/index.asp. To recap significant links in my original postings, I suggested that Oddens' Bookmarks at http://oddens.geog.uu.nl/index.html was a great example of what I was looking for. Roelof Oddens also mentioned Tony Campbell's excellent History of Cartography site at http://ihr.sas.ac.uk/maps/. I've discovered that Google (http://www.google.com) is now offering both PDF file search as well as topical indexing (for example, their http://www.google.com/unclesam site is quite good for finding US govt. resources) Until recently, only http://searchpdf.adobe.com could read online papers in PDF format. Duane Marble pointed out the new site for the GIS Master Bibliography that he had started back at Ohio State. It's now at ESRI's Virtual Campus and can be found at http://campus.esri.com/campus/library/bibliography. The collection now contains over 9100 searchable citations of articles from GIS journals, proceedings and reports. Glenn Letham referred me to the Ultimate GIS Search Engine at http://search.geocomm.com. This has over 150,000 pages indexed from the GeoCommunity and DataDepot sites, plus over 2100 hand-picked URLs focused on GIS, GPS, LBS and spatially-oriented topics. He says that when these are fed to a web spider it produces a database that takes 5 days to build! Glenn also thought highly of InfoMine's Maps and GIS INFOMINE Search Screen at http://infomine.ucr.edu/search/mapssearch.phtml He adds, "...this scholarly information resource yields some pretty good search results. They provide a handy list of recently added sites, a comprehensive table of contents, and you have the ability to search based on title, keyword, or subject." Christopher Weaver starts at Fast (http://www.alltheweb.com), the second largest search engine online (after Google), and then just digs deeper. He also suggested http://www.geocomm.com, http://www.geoplace.com, http://www.gisportal.com, and http://www.gislinx.com, although he said the gislinx site needs updating. John Hubbard also seconded Oddens' site, and reminded me that the plain old Internet indexes aren't out of the game yet. He suggests two from the Open Directory Project that are focused on GIS and maps: http://dmoz.org/Science/Social_Sciences/Geography/Geographic_Information_Systems/ http://dmoz.org/Reference/Maps/Libraries/ Jenny Stone Muilenburg described the University of Washington's Maps/Geographic Information Systems site that provides "links to online datasets, maps, software, magazines and journals, tutorials, etc., and ... a starting point for GIS-related reference questions." After rooting around some on my own, I've also discovered some interesting general-topic resources worth a mention. Gary Price's Direct Search page (a collection of Deep Web resources) at http://gwis2.circ.gwu.edu/~gprice/direct.htm and the Librarian’s Index to the Internet at http://www.lii.org are both full of information (especially Price's.) Also, the Web Brain at http://www.webbrain.com sports a rather cool "neural net"-looking java interface. Finally, for a deep site focused like a laser beam, check out the ANSI Electronic Standards Store at http://webstore.ansi.org/ansidocstore/default.asp, when you absolutely, positively got to have that standards document and you don't want to mess around! Thanks everyone! - Bill Thoen ------------------------------------------------------------ GISnet, 1401 Walnut St., Suite C, Boulder, CO 80302 tel: 303-786-9961, fax: 303-443-4856 mailto:[log in to unmask], http://www.ctmap.com/gisnet ------------------------------------------------------------ --- End Forwarded Message ---