The Signal Processing Information Base: a road to electronic information exchange

The Signal Processing Information Base (SPIB) project, funded by the NSF and supported by the Signal Processing Society, represents a first attempt to make widely available data, papers, software, and paper in a timely, effective fashion. Information dissemination via computer networks and sifting through information with search software would seem straightforward. However, modern publication involves not only prose, but also tables, graphics, plots, and many kinds of data displays-images, which makes the representation problem more severe. Policy oriented issues such as peer review and copyright have also emerged to complicate the desire to publish information quickly and widely. As the SPIB evolves, in concert with similar projects in a wide variety of disciplines, into a seamless, cross-linked, indexed, computer network that makes information available rapidly, these difficulties will intensify unless software environments are created that can support high-speed networks and platforms, and publication policies change to facilitate rapid dissemination