Re: ARPA/SEI WWW server barely mentions Ada

[weh@sei.cmu.edu (Bill Hefley)]

In article <CwJ7Kx.78C@world.std.com> srctran@world.std.com (Gregory
Aharonian) writes about the Software Engineering Institute's
Information Server on the World-Wide Web.

I am responding to this Usenet posting regarding the SEI Information Server
(located on the Internet at the Uniform Resource Locator (URL):
http://www.sei.cmu.edu/FrontDoor.html).  I will show that our Information
Server does indeed refer to Ada-related resources and the SEI's extensive
Ada-related efforts and publications.

I am the SEI's "webmaster" -- the individual responsible for the evolving
configuration of the SEI's World-Wide Web (WWW) services on the Internet.  

These services have been publicly accessible on the Internet as of August 16,
1994. Since then, we have had a very positive response to our WWW services
with over 62,000 accesses, resulting in the transfer of over 239 megabytes of
information. (Our usage statistics are available on our server at this URL:
http://www.sei.cmu.edu/Admin/stats/wwwstats.html) We demonstrated these
capabilities at this year's SEI Software Engineering Symposium, and received
very favorable comments from all attendees we spoke with, ranging from
"Joe/Jane Average" software engineer to members of the DoD's recent Blue
Ribbon Panel which reviewed the SEI.

In case you don't know me (http://www.sei.cmu.edu/webmaster.html and
http://www.sei.cmu.edu/SEI/people/weh/weh.html), I have a long involvement in
the SEI's work with Ada, and an even longer involvement with Ada, having been
first exposed to the language prior to its standardization through my work on
the USAF's Data System Modernization program in the early 1980s. I am the
principal author of the 2nd edition of the SEI's 'best seller' "Ada Adoption
Handbook: A Program Manager's Guide"
(http://www.sei.cmu.edu/SEI/pubs/abstracts/sei92tr29.html), as well as two
other SEI technical reports dealing with Ada
(http://www.sei.cmu.edu/SEI/pubs/abstracts/sei89tr28.html and
http://www.sei.cmu.edu/SEI/pubs/abstracts/sei87tr31.html).  I work for Mr.
Doug Waugh, who also has a long history with Ada, including service on the Ada
Board.

I am a strong supporter of Ada, and have extensive Ada experience; however, as
the SEI's webmaster, my current task is to develop a usable software
engineering information infrastructure which covers the entire software
engineering domain. A goal in providing this information service is to make
information available to those who are, in their own settings, advancing the
state of the practice of software engineering to improve the quality of
systems that depend on software.

I've acted on your suggestion about making some of our Ada work more visible
by adding a pointer to the Ada Adoption Handbook from the Ada topics section
(http://www.sei.cmu.edu/tech/pgmg-lang.html#Ada) of the SEI WWW server.  This
additional pointer is consistent with our next phase of development which
will insert additional pointers throughout the various Topics pages to the
work of the SEI and the ARPA SISTO principal investigators.

As we have developed from a prototype to a publicly-available service, we have
attempted to provide as many pointers to other sources as possible (i.e., add
value rather than duplicate information and efforts.) For these reasons, you
will see pointers to the AJPO's existing FTP server, instead of our creating
an unnecessary duplication of the fine work done by the Ada IC. These pointers
are located on our pages http://www.sei.cmu.edu/tech/pgmg-lang.html#Ada,
http://www.sei.cmu.edu/net/usgovtsources.html, and
http://www.sei.cmu.edu/net/cmu_sources.html.

I invite you to peruse our server in greater depth.  The SEI Information
Server provides substantial amounts of information about the SEI and our
activities (http://www.sei.cmu.edu/SEI/HomePage.html), including the abstracts
of all of our publicly-released documents (including at least six documents
dealing specifically with DARK) and the text of our Quarterly Updates, which
highlight our ongoing activities. I just did a quick search of our
publications abstracts using the search term "Ada" and found over ninety
published Ada-related SEI documents out of our three hundred-plus
publicly-released documents.

I invite you to provide us with additional feedback about our evolving WWW
information server.  We have built into the server capabilities
(http://www.sei.cmu.edu/webmaster.html) that allow a user to directly send us
e-mail with their comments or suggestions. I invite you to use this feature,
as we monitor this mail daily and respond to every message.  We have received
kudos, suggestions, flames and often pointers to additional resources that may
be useful to our readers through this mechanism.

Regards,

Bill Hefley
____________________________________________________________________________
Bill Hefley      Software Engineering Institute, Carnegie Mellon University
                 Pittsburgh, PA 15213  U.S.A. 
Office: +1-412-268-7793, internet: webmaster@sei.cmu.edu