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        Here's some encouraging information for sighted and non-sighted a like.
        Vicky

Project Seeks to Make Finding Data On the Web Less Irritating

By SREENATH SREENIVASAN

Anyone frustrated with how difficult it can sometimes be to find useful
information on the World Wide Web should understand Eliot Christian's
obsession.

"I am tired of trawling through dozens of pages looking for specific data,"
Christian said. "Why should it be so hard? All these companies think that
as long as their data is on their site, it will be automatically served up
for everyone. It's a fantasy."

As such, he has made it his mission to bring some order to the chaos he
sees around him. Christian is a computer specialist for the U.S. Geological
Survey, in Reston, Va., who primarily works with earth science information.

But he has spent the past six years involved inan ambitious project: trying
to get various government and commercial information providers around the
world to agree to a global standard for providing access to information.
Considering the jumble of sources out there, that is not an easy task.

Enter Christian's pet project, the Global Information Locator Service,
known as GILS. What started as a way to make global environmental data more
accessible is now a multinational effort that has, among other things,
brought some standardization to federal data access. The project is a
wide-reaching collaboration by government, industry and academia in the
United States and around the world.

Christian's agency contributes his time to the GILS initiative because his
job is to make earth science information accessible to the public. He is
part of a cooperative effort that includes hundreds of experts in countries
including Canada, Australia, Denmark, Sweden and Germany, as well as the
European Commission. Emblematic of the sometimes haphazard nature of the
Internet is that GILS is also often called the Government Information
Locator Service.

"No matter what the name, the goal is the same," said Toni Carbo, dean of
the School of Information Sciences at the University of Pittsburgh. "It's
quite simple. The U.S. government is the world's largest producer and user
of information. For business executives, researchers and individual
citizens to have access to that information is essential. GILS helps in
that process because it serves as an atlas that combines all the maps to
the territory in one place."

For the rest of the article, see
http://www.nytimes.com/library/cyber/week/110397web.html