The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) (last mentioned in the November 27, 1998 Scout Report) has recently placed online the Program and Position Papers from the December 2 Query Languages Workshop in Boston, Mass. Ninety-one participants heard 60 position papers on querying XML and RDF data. Users can view a participant list and the full texts of the papers at the site.

The Text REtrieval Conference (TREC) is an annual event that supports "research within the information retrieval community by providing the infrastructure necessary for large-scale evaluation of text retrieval methodologies." Proceedings of the conference covering all twelve years of its history are available on the TREC homepage. As TREC has evolved, it has added several focus areas that span new...