LINKING AND CONNECTING IN PHILADELPHIA

摘要

"Information, connections and community" was the theme of the 2002 annual conference of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (ASIST). The conference hotel was near Ben Franklin Parkway, in Philadelphia, close to the Free Library, museums and historic sites. Among the topics were: "The Semantic Web," presented by the ASIST Standards Committee and two speakers from World Wide Web Consortium (W3C); a system for compiling public commentary, by a USDA Forest Service team; and a plenary, moderated by Jose-Marie Griffiths of the University of Pittsburgh, "Openness, privacy and national security post 9/11," a conversation between Lee Strickland, a career attorney and intelligence officer, formerly of the Central Intelligence Agency, currently assigned to the University of Maryland as a Visiting Professor, and Thomas S. Blanton, Executive Director of the nongovernmental National Security Archive. Several sessions covered information policy and the digital divide, nationally and internationally. Others dealt with trends and innovations in scientific communications. The ASIST special interest groups (SIG) responsible for a number of these very timely sessions were the International Information Issues SIG (SIG III) and the Scientific and Technical Information Systems SIG (SIG STI). In recognition they were both awarded the title "SIG of the year."