Service Télématique et Communication

Editorial: more contracts,new activities		BRUNETTE is taking off
The beginning of this year has brought us a number of new projects and activities, and it seems that quite some more are still coming up ... In particular, STC is presently engaged in contractual negociations with the European Commission for two projects where we would be prime contractor: one in the ACTS programme and one in the Telematics Applications programme - hope to bring some great news in our next issue ... Presently, on top of our previous activities, we are involved in two projects with the Belgian Ministry of Scientific Policy, IRISnet and SYNAPSIS, described in this Newsletter. We also have new contracts with ALCATEL, CIK and DIGITAL, while our proposal for the City of Brussels to deploy the pilot phase of the BRUNETTE project has been accepted, and the implementation is under way. Last but not least, we have started working in the scope of the SCIMITAR project in the European Commission Telematics for Research programme. Paul VAN BINST		The Brussels Network for Telematics in Education (BRUNETTE) project of the City of Brussels has begun its pilot phase, which will see the connection of ten schools to the Internet, seven of which on a permanent basis. These seven schools will be linked by the BILAN virtual LAN service from BELGACOM (at 64 or 19.2 Kbps, based on a frame relay infrastructure), one of the schools being linked at 64 Kbps to STC and from here onto the INTERPAC service. A BRUNETTE web page already exists on our server, and a dedicated server will be installed in the future in one of the City's schools. We expect many applications to be developed by and for the City of Brussels schools, in collaboration with others of course; first contacts have already been taken with the Belgian National Opera ("La Monnaie/De Munt") education and multimedia departments.

Two High Level Lectures
In the scope of the ULB postgraduate programme in "Telematics and Organization" which we are coordinating, we have been fortunate and honoured to welcome two very high level guest lecturers: Mr. Patrice d'OULTREMONT, who is presently Director for Tariffs, Regulatory Affairs and Relations with the European Commission at BELGACOM, after a distinguished European carreer in the domains of information and communication technologies, and Mr. Georges DENEF, who is Director General of BIPT/IBPT, the (new) Belgian regulatory office for posts and telecommunications. Both have provided our postgraduate students with the best "inside" vision on the intricate aspects of deregulation , liberalization and interconnection problems of the telecom operators, as well as with their own opinion on the evolution of the European "telematics landscape"

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ACE2000 Working Group on Education

The ACE2000 Forum was created by a group of public telecommunication operators, industrialists, administrations and other users, to promote and help the evolution towards the information society. One of the seven working groups proposed by the Forum is the working group on Education. The leadership of the group belongs to Service Télématique et Communication. One of the major goals of this group is the exchange of information on the "education over networks" topic, particularly oriented towards the efficient usage of high speed networks. As a number of tools have been developed over the last decades to foster distance or distributed learning by making use of modern telematic networks (as ATM) and services, a Web server (http://www.iihe.ac.be/ace2000) has been created in order to provide and exchange information on such tools. Via the ACE2000 working group on education Web server, people are able to get information on various tools and projects dealing with distance education over the networks, and share their experience with other interested people. Our own experience through the MICE project (Multimedia Integrated Conferencing in Europe), as well as our activities related to the deployment of full Internet capabilities within the schools of the City of Brussels (the BRUNETTE project), are already available through the working group on education Web server. This specific Web server is of course linked to other sites providing useful information on the topic and top linked to the main ACE2000 Web server (www.ace2000.com).

Two trips to P.R. China
In January and April of this year, Professor P. VAN BINST has been invited to visit P.R.China. The first stay was for teaching at the Shanghai Maritime University and at Fudan University (the picture shows Prof. LI XINHUE and Prof. GAO GUANSHAN from these two institutions).		The second trip was organized between the Belgium-Ch ina Cultural Centre in Belgium and the Association for Friendship with Foreign People in China. This trip which led to Beijing, Xian and Shanghai, was coordinated by Prof. O. STEENHAUT from VUB and involved professors representing seven Belgian universities in the fields of microelectronics and telecommunicati ons (the picture shows the group at Shangai Jiao Tong University).

Starting SCIMITAR		Helping CIK to go on Internet
The SCIMITAR project runs under the European Commission "Telematics for Research" programme, with TERENA and ULB-STC as contractors. SCIMITAR stands for Support and Coordination for Integrated Multimedia Telematics Applications for Researchers. Full details on the whole Telematics for Research programme and the various projects can be found on the web server of TERENA, the Trans European Research and Education Networks Association (www.terena.nl). In the scope of the SCIMITAR project, ULB-STC is in charge of the "technology watch" function.		CIK, a leading Belgian financial company, and STC agreed on a consultancy contract by which STC will provide its expertise on how the CIK internal e-mail system could be interconnected to Internet so that CIK employees can directly exchange messages with their correspondents located on Internet in a safe manner. In addition, a study will be made on how a specific application used to exchange data between CIK and its clients over PSTN could be used over Internet.

Completing LIRN		IRISnet: Telematics between Administrations of the Brussels Region
The LIRN project, which is part of the European Community's Libraries programme, finished near the end of March of this year and was completed with a successful review by external experts and the Commission. The LIRN project team, consisting of experts, librarians and managers from Belgium, Portugal and the United covering about 87 resources in these three countries. The system supports a thesaurus based global search facility allowing the user to identify sources of information based on simple or advanced queries. At the same time the system acts as a Directory of library resources allowing the in-house information responsible personel to manage their own information locally and make it available to the world using the X.500 infrastructure on which this directory is based. The LIRN project has shown that X.500 is very well suited to provide a distributed resource classification and guided search system for all kinds of sources of information; not only for the libraries world, where it is offering a global search facility which is lacking in Z39.50, but also as a global Yellow Pages service for the X.500 directory itself or even for WWW. The future of LIRN is slowly getting a clear shape. While some of the library partners are seeking for extending both its physical coverage (adding other countries) as well as the number of registered resources, the pilot service will remain operational (http://sun7. iihe.ac.be/index_uk.html). An integration of the LIRN service with Z39.50 would be the ultimate goal. On the technical side (the STC side), more research will go into tailoring the LIRN technology for a general Yellow Pages extension for X .500. A pilot integration with the Names FLOW/PARADISE X.500 infrastructure already exists.		The IRISnet project was started in October 1995 with the aim of developing telematics services between Administrations of the Brussels Region. In the context of IRISnet, th services developed will focus on areas such as electronic messaging, work flow applications and electronic data interchange. The project, which will last over two successive periods of 2 years each, is funded by the Ministry of Scientific Policy and is led by the CIRB (Centre d'Informatique pour la Région Bruxelloise). It gathers several partners among which ULB/STC whose task has been to provide consultancy on networking and messaging infrastructures to be set up for the project. As a result of that work, the networking infrastructure will rely over TCP/IP. IRISnet will normally be interconnected to Internet via BelNet and should mainly make use of the TCP/IP infrastructure being put in place by the CCB Bank for their CGNet2000 network to interconnect Administrations. For messaging aspects, the project opted for an X.400-based infrastructure. The X.400 infrastructure being put in place by the CCB for their Publilink service should also be used to exchange messages between Administrations sites.