Mr Chairman, Ladies and Gentleman,

I would like to present to you, the outline of the Hungarian Physics Information System, which was built during the last four years and it is under continuous development.

The home page of the system is managed by the Computer Networking Center of the KFKI Research Institute for Particle and Nuclear Physics (the abbreviation KFKI comes from the earlier Hungarian name of the research centre. There are five research institutes of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences at the campus. The basic activities of the research institutes cover atomic energy research, technical physics and materials science, solid state physics and optics, particle and nuclear physics, isotopes and surface chemistry.

The Computer Networking Center is a department of the KFKI Research Institute for Particle and Nuclear Physics, however, our task and responsibility is to provide network services for all research institutes at the campus. There is a central homepage [1] managed by us, every research institute has its individual homepage as well, and they present data about their research activities and publications.

The central home page of KFKI was started four years ago, based on the earlier Gopher system of KFKI. Our aim from the beginning was to construct not only a home page for the institutes at the campus, but also to construct a central homepage in Hungary collecting physics related information from

• the institutes at the campus
• from all over the country and
• from all over the world, as well.

KFKI Web should serve physicists around the world by giving information about organizations, events, and results in physics in Hungary, and also serve the Hungarian physicists collecting physics related information from important places around the world.

There are about [2] 40-50 institutes and university departments in Hungary with physics related Web pages. The KFKI homepage has links to all of these sites. You will find most of the KFKI web pages both in English and Hungarian.

The present system contains among others mailing lists and e-journals:

We have e-journals in English language for the international community such as

We have the so called

Furthermore, we provide conference announcements, e-journal and mailing list archives, links to library catalogs and preprint services, information about grants, foundations, scholarships, job opportunities, and so on.

In the near future we will change the structure and reform the content of our system. We have started working on the new system, but it is not yet finished.

- Yes. I can say, it is a luck, that it is not yet complete, because I have heard during the conference a lot of good ideas, wich I would like to realize in our system.

[4] Here you can see the first page of the first version of the new homepage. The most important part of our new homepage will be active by clicking on the “physics” box. [5]

Its outlook seems to be similar to the TIPTOP (The Internet Pilot to Physics) homepage. Well, it is not by chance, surely the TIPTOP is a well constructed, simple, nevertheless a very useful system, such as we wold like to make too, in our Hungarian environment. And just one word more about TIPTOP... Thanks Mikko Karttunen: it loks very aesthetic and easy to survey!

Well, this new system is based on the physics pages of our present homepage. But it will be expanded and transformed in such a manner, that it should be as complete as possible in the field of Hungarian physics, and should be as transparent as possible in the field of physics information in the world, both for Hungarian and for users from abroad.

Let us see the main topics.

PHYSICS in HUNGARY

It will be a comprehensive index to Hungarian on-line physics resources. The base of it is this [6] part of the present system containing links to Hungarian physics related organizations, web sites, events, library services, publications, mailing lists, e-journals, educational documents, scholarships and job opportunities. Every mentioned topic contains references to the most important foreign resources too.

The next main topic is PHYSICS AROUND THE WORLD with selected on-line physics resources. Here [7] you can see the present stage of this topic. There will be of course the appropriate Hungarian reference too.

The PHYSICS CALENDAR [8] is already to day a well-organized halfautomatic system. It is always up-to-date, the physics seminars are of high priority. The webmaster gets regularly the seminar- and conference announcements from the whole country via the above mentioned FIZINFO mailing list. There will be also references to foreign physics conference calendars too.

The next topic is PHYSDEP

What you see here [9] is not public and not official yet. It is only an idea, we will realize it, if we have the necesarry devices and capacities.

As many of you know PhysDep means Physics Departments and it is a searchable database of the EurophysNet. It is a service of the European Physical Society managed at Oldenburg University. Hungary would like to create database similar to Ireland, and to integrate it into the EurophysNet PhysDep database.

We run a full Harvest system on our server computer. It gathers and indexes the data from the on-campus servers only. Our plan is to deploy Harvest gatherers in the Hungarian physics-related research institutes, university departments, labs etc. and to collect all the data by our broker. We are awaiting a bandwith upgrade on the Hungarian backbone between Budapest and the major cities (currently 1-2Mbit/s leased lines to 10-34 Mbit/s ATM), which will make possible (acceptable) the bulk data transfer between the gatherers and the central broker. The whole plan assumes a dedicated Harvest broker server which will cope with the increased computation and data storage requirements compared to our present situation.

To search for the Web documents at present, searching is implemented at KFKI Web by the Harvest gatherer, together with the Glimpse Broker. Indexing is done only at the KFKI website, indexing of the local websites will be done by locally installed Harvest gatherers. At present indexing of the local websites directly from the central website is not possible because of the rather small bandwith of the connections between Budapest and major cities in Hungary, (it is only 512Kbps). However, there are plans to upgrade the internal connections to ATM. Direct indexing the Hungarian websites will be made possible after the upgrade. Additional computers and disc capacity for the Harvest gatherer will also be necessary to extend searching for further Web servers containing physics related pages.

Our last main topic is the homepage of Roland Eötvös Physical Society [10].

The Society is one of the charter members of the European Physical Society. Its members are physicists and physics high school teachers. It has about 20 regional offices [11], and a lot of them is connected to the Internet already. They collect physics related information in their region and prepare web pages for the Hungarian Physics Information System.

Finally I would like to show you our “what is new” page [12], which contains every day the new links to the new documents in our system. I think, this small stars here specially useful, by clicking on them you will get to the KFKI WWW page containing the document.

You see, we have a lot of plans. We hope, that our efforts will be succesful and that these pages will support physicists by informing them about activities and scientific achievements of each other.

Thank you for your attention.