DOD's bugs get stuck on Web -

A Defense Department group that tracks disease-bearing insects and other pests across the globe has put indexing software on its World Wide Web server so users can trap bug information more easily.

The Defense Pest Management Information Analysis Center used ZyImage Web Server to trace more than 160,000 text files from 200 scientific journals going back to the early 1900s, said Lt. Cmdr. Jeffrey A. Corneil, the deputy chief.

The center, at the Army's Walter Reed Army Medical Center, supplies information about disease-carrying pests to DOD units during deployment.

The center bought ZyIndex Web Server, an earlier iteration of ZyImage Web Server, in early 1996 from ZyLab International Inc. of Rockville, Md., for $5,995 in an open-market purchase. Added imaging features brought the total to about $17,000, said Jackie Karlin, a spokeswoman for ZyLab.

Corneil said users don't have access to the full articles through the center's Literature Retrieval System at http://134.152.11.41 , but they can make Boolean, field or keyword searches and see listings complete with author, title, abstract, keywords and location data.

To get complete text, users can contact the Armed Forces Pest Management Board, Corneil said.

The search software runs on a 166-MHz Pentium server with 32M of RAM, 2G SCSI hard drive and Microsoft Windows NT 4.0.

The center contracted to have articles through 1996 scanned into a master database on a Sun Microsystems Inc. Sparcstation 20 with a 180G redundant disk array storage subsystem. Corneil said the contractor will have the database current by the end of 1997.

ZyImage Web Server is priced from $9,995. Other ZyLab customers include the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, FBI and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Contact ZyLab at 301-590-0900.