My name is Moshe Sniedovich and in my capacity as WORMS Chief Spider it is my pleasure to welcome you to our First-Time Visitors Centre. I shall try to make your first visit as pleasant as possible. So relax and free yourself from all your daily worries. As almost everyone here says, no worries!
If you ended up here as a result of a navigational error and know nothing about Operations Research (OR) nor about Management Science (MS), shame on you! But you may still enjoy our facilities. Take a short trip through our directories and do not hesitate to visit us again in the near future. To get out of here go back to the nearest Information Super-Highway simply follow the sign
and good luck to you!
Those of you who arrived here to learn something about WORMS and still wonder where you actually are, let me tell you first that you are right here:
yes, you are in Melbourne, Australia, home of the World-Wide-Web for Operations Research and Management Science endearingly known as WORMS.
And now that you know where you are, let me tell you something about what WORMS is all about.
What is WORMS all about ?
WORMS is a grass-roots WWW site, that I established in the early days of the WWW (1995) as a natural extension of my personal home page. Its main purpose was to complement the formal On-Line activities of OR/MS Societies world-wide. You'll recall that at that time not much was offered by the national OR/MS societies.
Clearly, the situation is much different now! The large national OR societies (eg INFORMS, ORS) and the International Federation of Operational Research Societies (IFORS) offer a wide spectrum of services to members and to the public at large. The question naturally arises: what is the rationale behind this project now?
The answer is simple.
One of my teaching and research interests is Interactive Computing and Modelling. I have done a lot of work in this area over the past twenty years. My decision at the end of 1994 to establish WORMS had been strongly influenced by this factor, as I realised that the WWW offered ample opportunities in this area. I am happy to report that the preliminary experimental work I have done within the WORMS project has lead to a major project called tutOR.
In fact, not only that this project now provides on line tutorial material to staff and students at the University of Melbourne, it also inspired the establishment of an international cooperative project called tutORial that is organised by IFORS. I would like to use this opportunity to encourage you to take an active part in this exciting project.
More recently, IFORS established an On Line Encyclopedia of OR/MS (IOE) This project will be launched officially on July 8 2002 at the IFORS 2002 Conference in Edinburgh, UK. The IOE site is now open for public preview. This exciting project was inspired by the old WORMS Virtual Encyclopedia of OR/MS.
If you are a frequent WORMS visitor you must have observed that the WORMS PhD Dissertations Directory has disappeared. If so, don't panic, this directory is alive an well. In fact, it is now incorporated into IOE.
At this stage I should perhaps stress that WORMS adheres to its original policy of initiating projects whose aim is to complement - rather than compete with - the activities of national OR/MS societies and IFORS.
Perhaps it would also be a good idea to say something about what we are not interested in doing. So here it is.
We are not interested in developing and maintaining listings of links to OR/MS resources on the WWW.
This is not because we think that such listings are not important and useful: such listings are important and useful. Rather it is because we are interested only in activities that provide significant added value to the OR/MS community. We maintained such listings in the past to some extent in cases where there were no such listings elsewhere.
There is one exception though. We shall continue to maintain our collection of OR/MS oriented jokes and anecdotes.
Last but not least, a comment on WORMS Spiders.
As indicated by the sign on the left, the original purpose of this project was to invite visitors to become involved with what we do here at WORMS HQ. However, after five years we can say with confidence: forget about it! It does not work. Not that we do not want you to join this exciting and stimulating project. To the contrary! We are desperately short of people and your help will be greatly appreciated. The point is that we have received numerous requests from OR/MS persons all over the world to join this project. The trouble is that once potential volunteers learn that they have to do real work, their level of enthusiasm tends to drop sharply.
In any case, we keep the sign here just in case you are different! If you wish to become a WORMS Spider (and do some real work) you should consult our guidlines concerning this matter.
If you still have questions concerning WORMS you may wish to visit our FAQ Directory. And if you want to become a WORMS Spider but do not know how to write HTML document, perhaps you should visit our Clinic and Rehabilitation Centre.
Webbly Yours
Moshe Sniedovich
WORMS Chief Spider
October 2, 2001
