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ICNDTnet - Internet for ICNDT Morio Onoe (leader, m.onoe@ieee.org), Rolf Diederich (rd@ndt.net), David Gilbert (david.gilbert@bindt.org) and Paul McIntire (McIntire@asnt.org) Task group on Internet, Policy and General Purpose Committee, ICNDT Contact

1. Introduction

The Internet has become a global infrastructure of communication and information exchange. There are numerous readily available applications of the Internet, which will enhance activities of ICNDT, especially during the period between World Conferences, held in every four years. Some of them are listed here with a hope of early implementation of these services among ICNDT members.

2. E-mail

E-mail is a basic application of the Internet. It provides a fast means for communication among ICNDT members. It is also economic because no letter sheet, envelope as well as long distance and international communication charges are required. In order to take full advantages of its benefits, the following items are recommended.

2.1 E-mail directories
ICNDT secretariat shall maintain up-dated E-mail directories of ICNDT delegates as well as member societies. It shall be available on the ICNDT WWW home page.

2.2 E-mail aliases
ICNDT secretariat shall provide E-mail aliases for delegates as well as member societies. An alias is a mail forwarding service. ICNDT member societies, committees and delegates will have E-mail aliases such as: UK@icndt.org, PGPC@icndt.org, MFARLEY@icndt.org.
Any message sent to an alias in an ICNDT mail server will be automatically forwarded to a corresponding real E-mail address. A big merit of E-mail alias is that one and only one notice of address change to ICNDT secretariat is necessary, when a real E-mail address is changed. This will make the maintenance of E-mail directory up-to-date much easier.

2.3 Mailing Lists
A mailing list for the entire ICNDT shall be set up by ICNDT secretariat for fast and economic information dissemination and communication among members. Any response from a member can be immediately shared among all members.
A more specific mailing list may be set up for a committee or a task group. A reply to a mailing list may go to an administrator, e.g. a chairman or a leader, or to all subscribers automatically. In PGPC, the use of mailing lists have been very successful.
It is recommended to circulate all the documents to be discussed in a meeting beforehand by a mailing list. This will make deeper discussion and faster processing of topics possible.

3. WWW

An increasing number of ICNDT members now operate their own WWW. It is the most economic way to globally disseminate multimedia information, including images and sounds.　It is hoped that the ICNDT home page in Rome will be greatly expanded. [1][2]

3.1 Pages promoting ICNDT
ICNDT members are encouraged to include a page for promoting ICNDT. The page may be linked to an original home page of ICNDT secretariat. The page may post an edited version to meet a local need or a translation in a national language other than English.

3.2 Web hosting
There are still many ICNDT members who have not their own WWW sites. ICNDT members who already have their own WWW may extend a web hosting service as a courtesy to members without WWW resources, as well as to a host of a regional NDT conference. [3][4]
There are also many websites, supported by philanthropy or advertisement, which offer not only free web hosting but also free E-mail alias, mailing list, mail magazine, etc.

4. Publications

4.1 ICNDT Handbook
An ICNDT Handbook, which is a basic document of ICNDT, contains

1. a history, Terms of Reference, a list of members of all previous ICNDT Steering Committees, a list of previous ICNDT meetings and conferences, details of Working Groups, and
2. a list of current ICNDT delegates, details of future planned Conferences. Its has been revised at the occasion of each WCNDT. The circulation, however, has been rather limited.

It is noted that the first portion(1) is archival in nature and can be posted on a WWW once for all. It will save much labor and cost for a member hosting WCNDT and yet provide much wider and easier access world wide. According to a decision taken by Dr. Nardoni, the president and Dr. Farley, the acting chairman of PGPC at Anaheim, U.S.A. in March 1998, all the agenda and the minutes are now open to the public and shall be included in this archival portion. The agenda and the minutes of meetings since 1994 are now available on the web.
All the minutes of ICNDT meetings at the World Conferences, have been re-typed in an electronic form from a printed version by the courtesy of D. J. Marshall (Canada) and are also available on the web. [5][6]
The second portion (2) needs more frequent update than the present four years period. Again this can be best served by WWW up to the minute.

4.2 ICNDT Recommendations
Recommendations on international harmonisations of training, qualification and certification of NDT personnel, November 1985, are another major historical and yet still useful contribution of ICNDT. Since an original copy is hard to obtain, publications on the web are welcome. [7]

4.3 WCNDT
It is recommended to plan electronic registration and submission of abstracts and papers. Electronic proceedings in CD-ROM and on a WWW shall be considered for compact storage and easy retrieval. For the first time, WCNDT-Roma 2000 will publish all the papers in CD-ROM instead of in print format. It will include a search program based on keywords and full text. The contents of the CD-ROM will be also available on the web. [8]

5. Search Engines and Directories

Search engines and directories are indispensable tools to find out useful information scattered among ever increasing web contents.
A search engine automatically visit most of websites on the Internet, extract meaningful words from each page and make index. When a query is made, the engine goes through the index to find matches and ranks them in order of what it considers most relevant. The coverage is exhaustive, but there is much noise, unwanted information, because of sophisticated but not yet perfect automatic ranking. Also many web pages are missed by a search engine, because of increasing use of graphical elements or PDF format in web page design.
A directory on a specific subject is edited by critical human reviewers. Hence a result of search usually contain less noise than results from search engines. ICNDT member societies have much opportunity to provide valuable and authoritative directories on various NDT subjects.

Accuracy of a search engine may be improved, if each web page carries keywords relevant to its contents. Use of "descriptions" and "keywords" in Meta Tags in HTML helps a search engine to make a better index.
Recently XML (Extensible Mark-up Language) becomes popular in web publishing and growing number of web software, including browsers, now supports XML. XML is a subset of SGML (ISO8879:1988) just like HTML. Unlike HTML, however, XML allows users to define new tags, which make indexing, even building web database easier. [9]
Since a document in XML is "well-formed", its structure and elements can be extracted in proper hierarchy and nesting by a parser now incorporated in major browsers. A document in XML is called "valid", if its content conforms to rules defined in a Document Type Definition (DTD). Any element of a valid XML document is precisely defined and can be extracted. Hence a search engine working on XML documents can yield a result with little noise. More importantly, XML enables a universal data exchange between otherwise incompatible applications and databases.
A customized DTD has been made for a specific field, such as mathematics or chemistry. ICNDT shall provide a model DTD for international retrieval and exchange of NDT data. It is a natural extension of previous contributions of ICNDT on NDT vocabulary and thesaurus.

6. Conclusion

ICNDT will flourishes with members by close collaborations overcoming distance and time barriers. Internet is a versatile tool to accomplish this aim quickly and economically. This report describes several applications that can be easily and quickly implemented.
It should be kept in mind that the Internet consists of distributed resources in nature. Its contents are best maintained and updated by people directly involved. There have been already many excellent resources in the Internet, which may be linked from any WWW page. It is hoped to avoid any duplicate work and concentrate on productive work by mutually sharing of labor and cost over the Internet.

References

1. ICNDT Home Page in Rome.
   http://www.aipnd.it/icndt.htm
2. First hand accounts of WWW publishing by ICNDT members.
   http://www.ricoh.co.jp/net-messena/NDTWW/INTERN/ICNDT/ICNDTNET/INPUT.html
3. Examples of WWW hosting for the 14th WCNDT and Indian Society for NDT.
   http://www.ricoh.co.jp/net-messena/NDTWW/CALENDAR/WCNDTindia/WCNDT.html
4. Examples of WWW hosting for APCNDT.
   http://www.ricoh.co.jp/net-messena/NDTWW/INTERN/APCNDT/APCNDT.html
5. ICNDT: Terms of Reference and versions of proposed new constitution.

Agenda and unconfirmed minutes of recent ICNDT and PGPC meetings.
http://www.ricoh.co.jp/net-messena/NDTWW/INTERN/ICNDT.html
6. ICNDT Handbook

http://www.ricoh.co.jp/net-messena/NDTWW/INTERN/ICNDT/ARCHIVE/
7. ICNDT Recommendations

http://www.ricoh.co.jp/net-messena/NDTWW/INTERN/ICNDT/DOC85/
8. Electronic Proceedings of the 15^th WCNDT-Rome2000 on the Internet
   http://www.ndt.net/wcndt2000/
9. XML
   http://www.w3.org/XML/

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