ETAI History and Vintage Webpages

The ideas for ETAI developed originally from two sources. One of t hem was the webpage for the "European Colloquium for Spatial and Temporal Reasoning", or ECSTER. The early ECSTER webpages are also displayed here. ECSTER was started within an ESPRIT Network called LAC, for "Logic and Change". It was then adopted as an activity within CompuLog by a formal decision at the Compulog meeting in November, 1995. Many of the actual and intended activities in ECSTER have then been continued and extended, either in ETAI as a whole, or in the RAC area within ETAI.

The other source of ETAI was from a number of discussions, and resulting publications about how the emergence of WWW would influence scientific publishing. This background is described in the ETAI webpage of February, 1997 which is linked from the present menu.

These two backgrounds resulted in the "Original ETAI Proposal" (also linked from the present menu) which was presented in December, 1996.

Both ECSTER and ETAI have been presented by webpages that went through several generations of changes. In general, each time a new version of the main webpage was installed, we saved the previous one under a backup name, for example "index-old.html". The present menu contains links to those preserved pages. Their layout is authentic, but with respect to the links within the preserved pages, it must be understood that the referents may often have changed since the time that the preserved page was in active use. That is why some of the old pages contain links (that now refer) to more modern pages. We plan to try to retrieve the older referents as well.

The month indication for the pages refers to the latest update stated on the page, when available, and otherwise to the latest update recorded by the Unix file system. In the latter case it is probably the date of preservation, rather than the date of creation of the page.