🚀 go-pugleaf

     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.