From: Erik Sandewall 
Date: Tue, 13 Feb 1996 14:39:26 +0100
To: ecster-res@ida.liu.se
Subject: ECSTER, Newsletter, Spatial and Temporal Reasoning


Dear Colleague,

I am writing because your name is included in the list of researchers 
in Spatial and Temporal Reasoning, used by the European Colloquium for
Spatial and Temporal Reasoning (ECSTER). I want to make you aware of
the Colloquium's existence (if you did not know of it before) and of 
its current and intended services.

The Colloquium's home page is located at
    http://vir.liu.se/brs/
and it contains a menue of our various facilities: a Newsletter, various
calendarium-style information (researchers, research groups, forthcoming 
conferences, journals, etc), bibliographic information, and an archive
for tech reports from member nodes. Please consult this home page for
finding out more about the Colloquium.

We are starting with current and short-lived information, mostly
focussing on the area of Reasoning about Actions and Change. The first
issue of the *Newsletter* has just been issued (the link to it is an
item in the home page), and contains references to papers on reasoning
about actions and change at two forthcoming conferences, TARK-VI and
ISMIS-96, as well as to two recent ones, facilitating your access to 
those papers. Our intention is to issue the Newsletter once a month, and 
to fill it with fresh information.

In a longer perspective, I hope to complement the News with information
structures of more lasting value, which represent the state of the art
in our field of research. The bibliography, with electronic links to
as many as possible of the referenced articles, is the obvious 
starting-point. However, the store of bibliographic information should 
not merely be a list of references and electronic links; it should also 
contain commentary, both by the author and by others, whereby it can
document the context in which the work was performed and the various 
relationships that exist between research articles: what result relied 
on which other, what was the original source of such-and-such result, 
and so on. 

We all receive "too much" electronic mail. For your convenience, I plan
to use the following policy: for the first three issues of the Newsletter,
you will receive a two-line, disposable message saying "New ECSTER 
Newsletter is out, please take a look". After that time, you'll be asked
if you wish to continue receiving those reminders, or not.

I hope you will find this a valuable source of information. If you would
like to contribute information to it, you will also be more than welcome.

Best regards
Erik Sandewall