DoCIS aims to provide more than yet another online information retrieval service. We hope that DoCIS will set an example through innovative service principles.

Our first principle is construction transparency. We want to show how to build a service like DoCIS. Complete construction tranparency is possible because the entire DoCIS system runs on open-source software. For practical reasons, however, it would be silly for us to put on the DoCIS web site the source code of Apache, Perl, swish++, and other packages used. This code is available elsewhere. But we do take two steps:

• We provide a narrative on how the service is built. This is our internal documentation.
• We make the project available for browing through the so-called "/strip/docis" interface. It allows you to look at the directory tree that DoCIS uses. It shows all the files written for the project.

Our second principle is that of transportability. We try to build DoCIS is in such a way that it can be moved and implemented on other machines with a minimum of effort. We hope that for someone with basic Debian/GNU Linux system administration skills it should not take more than one day to port DoCIS to a machine. We will publish a more detailed set of requirements when we get requests to install a replica of DoCIS later, when we get the first request to install such a replica.

Our third principle is usage transparency. We want to show all the data that we have available about our usage. The reason is simple. We want to have this data used by folks who do work in digital library usage. Therefore we include log data in the strip/docis interface.