The Clearinghouse for Networked Information Discovery and Retrieval or CNIDR was an organization funded by the U.S.

National Science Foundation The National Science Foundation (NSF) is an independent agency of the United States government that supports fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering. Its medical counterpart is the National ...

from 1993 to 1997 and based at the Microelectronics Center of North Carolina (MCNC) in Research Triangle Park. CNIDR was active in the research and development of open source software and open standards, centered on information discovery and retrieval, in the emerging Internet. Among the software developed at CNIDR were Isite, an open source Z39.50 implementation and successor to the free version of WAIS, and

Isearch Isearch is open-source text retrieval software first developed in 1994 by Nassib Nassar as part of the Isite Z39.50 information framework. The project started at the Clearinghouse for Networked Information Discovery and Retrieval (CNIDR) of t ...

, an open source text retrieval system. CNIDR staff were involved in the development of open standards in the

Internet Engineering Task Force The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is a standards organization for the Internet and is responsible for the technical standards that make up the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP). It has no formal membership roster or requirements and a ...

, the Z39.50 Implementors Group and

Dublin Core 220px, Logo image of DCMI, which formulates Dublin Core The Dublin Core, also known as the Dublin Core Metadata Element Set (DCMES), is a set of fifteen "core" elements (properties) for describing resources. This fifteen-element Dublin Core has ...

. CNIDR collaborated with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) to develop the USPTO's first Internet-based patent search systems. One of these provided full text searching and images of medical patents related to the research and treatment of HIV/AIDS and issued by the US, Japanese and European patent offices. Another system, known as the US Patent Bibliographic Database, provided searching of "front page" bibliographic information for all US patents since 1976.

References

{{Reflist Information retrieval organizations Internet Standards Internet protocols Internet search engines Organizations established in 1992