Network Working Group J. Foster, Editor Request for Comments: 1689 University of Newcastle upon Tyne RARE Technical Report: 13 August 1994 FYI: 25 Category: Informational
A Status Report on Networked Information Retrieval: Tools and Groups
Produced as a collaborative effort by the Joint IETF/RARE/CNI Networked Information Retrieval - Working Group (NIR-WG)
Status of this Memo
This memo provides information for the Internet community. This memo does not specify an Internet standard of any kind. Distribution of this memo is unlimited.
Abstract
The purpose of this report is to increase the awareness of Networked Information Retrieval by bringing together in one place information about the various networked information retrieval tools, their developers, interested organisations, and other activities that relate to the production, dissemination, and support of NIR tools. NIR Tools covered include Archie, WAIS, gopher and World Wide Web.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction .............................................. 2 2. How the information was collected ......................... 3 3. What is covered? .......................................... 3 4. Updating information ...................................... 5 5. Overview of the types of NIR Tool ......................... 5 6. NIR Tools ................................................. 9 7. NIR Groups ................................................ 123 8. Security Considerations ................................... 180 9. Acknowledgements .......................................... 180 10. Author's Address .......................................... 180 11. Appendix A: NIR Tool Template ............................. 181 12. Appendix B: NIR Group Template ............................ 188 13. Appendix C: Email Lists and Newsgroups .................... 192 14. Appendix D: Coming Attractions ............................ 207 15. Appendix E: Extinct Critters (Tools) ...................... 222 16. Appendix F: Extinct Critters (Groups) ..................... 222
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1. Introduction
As the network has grown, along with it there has been an increase in the number of software tools and applications to navigate the network and make use of the many, varied resources which are part of the network. Within the past two and a half years we have seen a widespread adoption of tools such as the archie servers, the Wide Area Information Servers (WAIS), the Internet gopher, and the Worldwide Web (WWW). In addition to the acceptance of these tools there are also diverse efforts to enhance and customise these tools to meet the needs of particular network communities.
There are many organisations and associations that are focusing on the proliferating resources and tools for networked information retrieval (NIR). The Networked Information Retrieval Group is a cooperative effort of three major players in the field of NIR: The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), the Association of European Research Networks (RARE) and the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI), specifically tasked to collect and disseminate information about the tools and to discuss and encourage cooperative development of current and future tools.
The purpose of this report is to increase the awareness of NIR by bringing together in one place information about the various networked information retrieval tools, their developers, interested organisations, and other activities that relate to the production, dissemination, and support of NIR tools. The intention is to make this a "living document". It will be held on-line so that each section may be updated separately as appropriate. In addition, it is intended that the full document will be updated once a year so that it provides a "snapshot" report on activities in this area.
Whilst the NIR tools in this report are being used on a wide variety of information sources including files and databases there remains much that is currently not accessible by these means. On the other hand, the majority of the NIR Tools described here are freely available to the networked Research and Education community. Tools for accessing specialised datasets are often only available at a cost.
It should be noted that in many ways networked information retrieval is in its infancy compared with traditional information retrieval systems. Thesaurus construction, boolean searching and classification control are issues which are under discussion for the popular NIR Tools but as yet are not in widespread use. However it should be said that, with the vast amount of effort that is currently going into the NIR field, rapid progress is being made. Much work is currently being done on expanding some of the NIR tools to include
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handling of multimedia information services. Progress has also been made in the discussions on classifying and cataloguing electronic information resources.
2. How the information was collected
The information contained in this report was collected over the network from the contacts for each NIR Tool or Group using two templates:
- the NIR Tool Template, included in Appendix A; - the NIR Group Template, included in Appendix B.
The contents of these templates were discussed by the NIR WG in Boston (July, 1992) and subsequently on the email list. (See the Section on the NIR-WG for details of how to join this mailing list.) The initial draft report was discussed at the NIR Working Group in Washington (November, 1992) and updated and added to at subsequent WG meetings. Before the final submission as an RFC the individual templates were reviewed by independent reviewers from around the world. Their efforts are acknowledged in Section 9.
The NIR Tool template was used to collect the information necessary to identify and track the development of networked information retrieval tools. This template asked for information such as how and where to get the software for each NIR Tool, documentation, demonstration sites, etc. The main part of the template has been completed by the main individual responsible for the tool. Sections of the template (e.g., on clients) may have required completion by others.
The NIR Group template requested information on the aim and purpose of the group, the current tasks being undertaken, mailing lists, document archives, etc.
3. What is covered?
In the current report you will find information on the following NIR tools:
Alex archie gopher Hytelnet Netfind Prospero Veronica WAIS (including freeWAIS)
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WHOIS World Wide Web (including MOSAIC) X.500 White Pages
Appendix D covers "Forthcoming Attractions": Hyper-G Soft Pages WHOIS++
and the following NIR Groups:
CNI Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) Architectures and Standards Directories and Resource Information Services TopNode for Networked Information Resources, Services and Tools
CNIDR Clearinghouse for Networked Information Discovery and Retrieval
IETF Integrated Directory Services (IDS) Integration of Internet Information Resources (IIIR) Networked Information Retrieval (NIR) joint IETF/RARE WG Network Information Services Infrastructure (NISI) OSI-Directory Service (OSI-DS) Uniform Resource Identifiers (URI) Whois and Network Information Lookup Service (WNILS)
IRTF Internet Research Task Force Research Group on Resource Discovery and Directory Service (IRTF-RD)
NISO Z39.50 Implementors Group
RARE Information Services and User Support Working Group (ISUS)
USMARC/OCLC USMARC Advisory Group; OCLC Internet Resources Cataloging Experiment (USMARC/OCLC)
Appendix C contains a list of the relevant email lists and Appendix D contains information on "Coming Attractions" which are NIR tools not yet in widespread use.
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4. Updating Information
Updates on and additions to the information contained in this report are welcome. CNIDR have agreed to host the report and to accept updates to individual templates from the template maintainers. Send updates using the appropriate template (from Appendix A or Appendix B of this report) to:
nir-updates@cnidr.org
The current templates and this report may be retrieved from the UK Mailbase Server:
Via anonymous ftp (use your email address as the password):
The following is an overview of major networked information retrieval (NIR) tools available on the Internet. There are many excellent books which discuss the Internet and NIR Tools in detail. Such books include "The Whole Internet User's Guide and Catalog" by Ed Krol and published by O'Reilly and Associates, Inc and "The Internet Guide for New Users" by Daniel Dearn and published by Meckler.
The number of these NIR tools is large and growing quickly. Certain techniques reappear regularly and seemingly different tools may perform similar tasks, allowing a simple classification of projects encompassing most of the existing tools and services.
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The classification presented here is only one possible ordering. The goal is to define in broad outlines what can be done with particular tools, realizing that users will always find novel unanticipated ways of applying them.
Interactive Information Delivery Services (Gopher, World Wide Web)
Basic Internet services such as electronic mail and anonymous FTP can be used to share information across the Internet, but neither allows simple browsing and neither is particularly easy for the newcomer to learn to use. Gopher and the World Wide Web (W3) are two recent developments that attempt to make it easier to distribute information over the Internet. Both allow the user to browse information across the network without the necessity of logging in or knowing in advance where to look for information.
The Gopher project was first developed at the University of Minnesota to provide a simple campus-wide on-line information system. Gopher represents information as a simple hierarchy of menus and files. It has limited capability to recognize different types of files, allowing, for example, the display of selected types of image files. Gateways to other services are provided (usually in a manner that is transparent to the user). The underlying Gopher protocol is simple, and has facilitated the creation of freely available clients for use on a variety of hardware platforms and operating systems. The more recent Gopher+ protocol adds the ability to provide documents in alternate forms (PDF, PostScript, RTF, Word). These features and the ease of installing and administering gopher servers has led to an explosive growth of gopher sites since its initial deployment. As of November 1993, there were over 2200 known servers.
World Wide Web relies on hypertext; formatted documents are displayed, and hypertext links within the document can be selected to travel from the current document to another. W3 allows a user to annotate documents (using hypertext links), provides gateways to other services, and has multimedia support (for example, on appropriate hardware platforms it can intermix text and images in a displayed document). There is a range of free W3 clients, supporting many environments. World Wide Web was originally developed at CERN for the High Energy Physics Community.
Gopher and WWW share a maintenance problem in that there is no automated way to update links to other documents when those documents are moved or removed.
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Directory Services (WHOIS, X.500)
Directory Service tools are intended to provide a lookup service for locating information about users (often referred to as White Pages), or services and service providers (Yellow Pages). For example, a White Pages service might be used to locate an electronic mail address, given a name and organization, while a Yellow Pages service could be used to locate an online library catalog or file archive site.
One of the first directory services deployed on the Internet was WHOIS, a simple White Pages service created to track key network contacts for the early DARPA-sponsored incarnation of the Internet. A number of sites currently operate WHOIS servers, based on a range of extensions and enhancements to the original model. WHOIS enjoys the advantages of simplicity and the presence of WHOIS client software on a preponderance of Internet-connected hosts. Work is underway on a more powerful protocol, known as WHOIS++, which is backwards-compatible with WHOIS.
The X.500 Directory Service is a much more ambitious Directory project that has been under development for a number of years under the aegis of ISO/OSI. Implementations, concerned primarily with White pages services, are available in the public domain and from commercial sources. There are LDAP based X.500 clients available for most major platforms, as well as a LDAP based gopher gateway to X.500.
Despite years of effort, there is still no single White Pages Directory Service for the entire Internet; Yellow Pages services remain even less well developed and deployed. The cost of setting up the service is one obstacle; maintaining the required databases is even more daunting.
There are several Internet-based projects that build indexed catalogs of information to facilitate searching and retrieval. The first such services provided network access to library card catalogs, with more recent projects indexing network-based information.
archie:
The archie service began as a simple project to catalog the contents of hundreds of ftp-accessible online file archives. The archie service gathers location information, name, and other details describing such files and creates an index database.
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Users can contact an archie server and search this database for files they require.
The archie service is accessible through a range of access methods, including telnet, stand-alone client programs running on a user's own machine, gopher, WWW, or via electronic mail. The initial implementation of archie tracks over 2,100,000 filenames on over 1,200 sites around the world (as of November 1993). There are about 30 (geographically distributed) archie servers. Both commercial and freely available versions of the archie client software are available.
Work continues on extending the archie service to provide additional types of information. The latest version is being used to provide a prototype Yellow Pages service and directories of online library catalogs and electronic mailing lists.
Veronica:
Veronica arose as an attempt to do for the world of Gopher what archie did for the world of ftp. A central server periodically scans the complete menu hierarchies of Gopher servers appearing on an ever-expanding list (over 2000 sites as of November 1993). The resulting index is provided by a veronica server and can be accessed by any gopher client.
Online library catalogs:
A large number of libraries make their computerized library catalogs available over the Internet. Most are available through telnet sessions in which the user connects to a specific address and logs in using a specific login name. Some are also available through other tools, such as Gopher.
Text-based Indexing Services (WAIS)
WAIS:
Wide Area Information Servers (WAIS) is a system for indexing and serving information in a network-based environment. It is distinct from indexing tools such as archie and veronica in that it is used to index text-based target documents on a server, as well as descriptions of the contents of a server.
A WAIS server allows the administrator to set up an index of the documents (or resources) to be published. The user employs a WAIS client to attach to a particular WAIS server, and specifies a search pattern which is matched against the server's index. In
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early WAIS clients, searches are specified as simple natural- language queries; common ("stop") words are removed, and Boolean "ORs" are implicitly added between the remaining list of words. Matching documents are rank-ordered according to a simple statistical weighting scheme which attempts to indicate likely relevance. The user may choose to view selected documents, or further refine the search. The results of one search may be used to successively refine future searches ("relevance feedback"). Gopher clients can also access WAIS servers via a transparent gateway.
Both freely available and commercial versions of WAIS servers and clients are available. Current work is attempting to add Boolean expressions and proximity and field specifications to queries.
There are currently (as of November 1993) some 500 registered WAIS databases with an estimated 2000 additional databases that are not yet registered. There are approximately another 100 commercial WAIS databases.
6. NIR Tools
This section contains detailed information about the various NIR Tools. It is ordered alphabetically.
The Alex filesystem provides users and applications transparent read access to files in anonymous FTP sites on the Internet. Today there are thousands of anonymous FTP sites with a total of a few millions of files and roughly a terabyte of data. The standard approach to accessing these files involves logging in to the remote machine. This means that an application can not access remote files like local files. This also means that users do not
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have any of their aliases or local tools available. Users who want to use an application on a remote file first have to manually make a local copy of the file. There is no mechanism for automatically updating this local copy when the remote file changes. The users must keep track of where they get their files from and check to see if there are updates, and then fetch these. In this approach many different users at the same site may have made copies of the same remote file each using up disk space for the same data.
Alex addresses the problems with the existing approach while remaining within the existing FTP protocol so that the large collection of currently available files can be used. To get reasonable performance long term file caching is used. Thus consistency is an issue. Traditional solutions to the cache consistency problem do not work in the Internet FTP domain: callbacks are not an option as the FTP protocol has no provisions for this and polling over the Internet is slow. Therefore, Alex relaxes file cache consistency semantics, on a per file basis, and uses special caching algorithms that take into account the properties of the files and of the network to allow a simple stateless filesystem to scale to the size of the Internet.
USER'S VIEW:
To a user or application, Alex is just a normal filesystem. Any command that works on local files will work on Alex files. Since Alex is a real filesystem, nothing needs to be recompiled and no libraries are changed. Thus, users can apply all of their existing skills and tools for using files.
The user sees a filesystem with a hierarchical name space. At the top level (/alex) there are top-level Internet domains like "edu", "com", "uk", and "jp". Each component of the hostname becomes a directory name. Then the remote path is added at the end. If the user does a "ls /alex/edu/berkeley" he sees some machine names such as "ucbvax" and "sprite" and some directories on berkeley.edu. From the "ls" it is not clear what is where. The user may or may not be aware of host boundaries.
INFORMATION PROVIDER'S VIEW:
Alex is implemented as a user level NFS server. NFS was chosen because it makes it easy to add Alex to a wide range of machines. Most machines can simply use the mount command.
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The model of usage is that there is one Alex server running at each institution (though this is not required in any way). Users mount the local server which caches files for users at that site.
Any information put into any anonymous FTP site becomes available via Alex.
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, Information Science and Technology Office, under the title "Research on Parallel Computing," ARPA Order No. 7330. Work furnished in connection with this research is provided under prime contract MDA972-90-C-0035 issued by DARPA/CMO to Carnegie Mellon University. Vincent Cate is supported by an "Intel foundation graduate fellowship".
@InProceedings{cate:alex, author = "Vincent Cate", title = "Alex - a Global Filesystem", booktitle = "Proceedings of the Usenix File Systems Workshop", year = 1992, pages = "1--11", month = may, place = "Ann Arbor, MI", keyword = "distributed file system, wide-area file system"
FTP to alex.sp.cs.cmu.edu and "cd to doc". Get the "README" or anything else there. A current version of this document may be there and called "NIR.Tool". In Alex this file is named "/alex/edu/cmu/cs/sp/alex/doc/NIR.Tool".
The archie system is a tool for gathering, indexing and serving information from around the Internet. The current version serves a collection of filenames found at anonymous FTP sites, as well as a smaller collection of text descriptions for software, data and other information found at anonymous FTP archives. Additional databases are under development.
User's View:
Users run a client program to connect to an archie server and issue search commands to find information in an archie database. In the case of an anonymous FTP filename, this information can then be used to fetch the file directly from the archive site using the `ftp' command. To the user, archie could be seen as a `secondary source' of information which, because of the high cost of locating and serving, would not otherwise be available.
The user searches the archie databases through either a telnet session to a machine running an archie server, or by using a stand-alone client program (which uses the Prospero protocol for sending and receiving requests). There is also an email interface which allows users to send and receive search requests via electronic mail.
Freely available archie clients exist for most operating systems and can be fetched using anonymous FTP from most of the current archie servers. There are also gateways to the archie system from many other NIR tools, including Gopher, WAIS and WWW. An X.500 interface to archie is currently under development.
Information Provider's View:
There are two types of information providers who would be interested in archie. Primary information providers are interested in having a summary of the information provided by their service tracked by an archie server. Secondary service
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providers, or those sites wishing to provide a "value-added" service for the Internet can elect to run an archie server at their site to provide a useful service to users, to raise the profile of their institution on the Internet, or to provide market differentiation (for commercial service providers).
The archie system is of particular utility serving information where there are many sites to be searched and/or where the cost of searching each site is high.
For example, there are currently over 1,200 anonymous FTP sites on the Internet, and the number continues to grow. Searching for a specific filename at a single site may involve scanning hundreds, or even thousands of filenames. Thus, most operators of anonymous FTP archives welcome the fact that archie indexes and serves the names of all files available from each site tracked.
Information Types Supported:
The archie system allows the gathering and serving of arbitrary information types, although the current system serves only freeform text and a dedicated text format for filename listings. Internally, the archie system now supports a WAIS search engine and frontends for Gopher, WWW and WHOIS++ for accessing archie information through Gopher clients is now being tested. Additional collections of information to be served by the archie software will be announced.
Funded by licensing of archie software and development contracts from sponsors. Additional information services based upon this software are now being tested.
RFC 1689 Networked Information Retrieval: Tools and Groups August 1994
This mailing list is for people interested in the archie project and its future developments. Announcements of upgrades, new services, etc. are made to this list.
Archive: none
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Address: archie-maint@bunyip.com
Administration: archie-maint-request@bunyip.com
Description:
This mailing list is for people who operate and maintain archie servers. Announcements of bug fixes, new releases and discussion of new features are carried out on this list.
This mailing list is for people who are involved in the Internet Anonymous FTP Archives Working Group of the IETF. This group was involved in standardizing the encoding of information at anonymous FTP archives and thus is of interest to operators and users of the archie system. It came to completion in November, 1992 and produced two documents which have been presented to the IETF as informational RFCs.
RFC 1689 Networked Information Retrieval: Tools and Groups August 1994
Description:
This newsgroup is for operators and maintainers of Internet archives. Announcements and discussions of issues related to archie are presented here, as well as discussions of more general issues relating to archiving and Internet services.
Archive: not known
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Name: alt.internet.services
Description:
This newsgroup is for people interested in Internet-related services, with a focus at the user level. Announcements and discussions of issues related to archie are presented here, as well as discussions of more general issues relating to Internet services.
The current archie system clients use the Prospero protocol for communication with the search engine on the archie server. Freely available clients are available which include source to perform this communication for those wishing to implement additional clients.
The archie server is capable of building arbitrary databases, using arbitrary search and access engines and the current release ships with the public domain implementation of WAIS. We expect future archie servers to serve information using this protocol. The current server system assumes the TCP/IP protocol suite is available, and in particular the ftp protocol for data gathering.
The archie system can be accessed through systems operating the Gopher, WAIS and WWW (HDDL) protocols. A gateway from the X.500 system is under development.
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What it runs over:
The Prospero protocol implementation runs over its own implementation of a reliable datagram protocol based upon UDP. Data gathering runs over the TCP/IP protocol suite.
Other NIR tools this interworks with:
Prospero, Gopher, WAIS, WWW.
Future plans:
The archie system became a commercial product in October, 1992, marketed by Bunyip Information Systems Inc. The company plans to market additional data gathering modules to allow the server code to build additional types of databases. Work is also underway to integrate extensions to WHOIS to allow the building and maintaining of White Pages (names) directories. The company is also working on other Internet information tools that will work with the archie system.
Date completed or updated: 1 November, 1993 By: Name: Peter Deutsch Email address: peterd@bunyip.com
Platform: Sun SPARC running SunOS 4.1 or later. IBM RS6000 running AIX version 3.2 or later. for additional UNIX platforms, contact Bunyip Information Systems details.
Primary Contact: Name: Alan Emtage Email address: bajan@bunyip.com Telephone: +1-514-398-8611
Server software available from: Bunyip Information Systems Inc. email: info@bunyip.com
Location of more information:
Additional information on the archie product line is available from the anonymous ftp archives on the various archie server sites. Try "archie.ans.net", "archie.sura.net", "archie.au", etc.
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Latest version number: archie 3.1
Brief Scope and Characteristics:
This is the commercial inmplementation of the archie system, replacing a version done as a Masters project at McGill University during the period 1990-1992. It comes with an archie telnet client that offers a number of minor improvements over earlier versions. Additional releases, with a number of additional improvements, are planned in the coming months.
Approximate number of such servers in use: Currently about 27 (not all are publicly available)
General comments:
Most users access archie through a freeware or public domain client program. These are available from most archie servers via anonymous FTP. Check out the archie directory on any of the publicly available archie servers or the banner message when logging into any of the archie telnet clients for more details.
Date completed or updated: 1 November, 1993 By: Name: Peter Deutsch Email address: peterd@bunyip.com
Platform: command line shell, written in C. Works with both UNIX and MSDOS/OS2 shells.
Primary Contact: Name: Brendan Kehoe Email address: brendan@cygnus.com Telephone: not known
Client software available from: most archie server hosts and major Internet archives. Look for filename "c-archie-1.3.2.tar.Z".
Location of more information: Packaged with software.
Latest version number: 1.3.2
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Brief Scope and Characteristics:
This program provides a simple command line interface to the archie server system, using the Prospero protocol. Written in C, it has been ported to MSDOS and OS2.
General comments:
This program should not be confused with the archie system telnet interface, which is a program that runs on the archie server itself.
Future plans: Not known
-------------------
Date completed or updated: 1 November, 1993 By: Name: Peter Deutsch Email address: peterd@bunyip.com
Platform: command line shell, written in Perl. Works with both UNIX and MSDOS/OS2 shells.
Primary Contact: Name: Khun Yee Fung Email address: clipper@csd.uwo.ca Telephone: not known
Client software available from: most archie server hosts and major Internet archives. Look for filename "perl-archie-3.8.tar.Z".
Location of more information: Packaged with software.
Latest version number: 3.8
Brief Scope and Characteristics:
This program provides a simple command line interface to the archie server system, using the Prospero protocol. Written in Perl.
General comments:
This program should not be confused with the archie system telnet interface, which is a program that runs on the archie server itself.
Future plans: Not known
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Date completed or updated: 1 November, 1993 By: Name: Peter Deutsch Email address: peterd@bunyip.com
Platform: archie client program for VMS systems.
Primary Contact: Name: Brendan Kehoe Email address: brendan@cygnus.com Telephone: not known
Client software available from: most archie server hosts and major Internet archives. Look for filename "archie-vms.com".
Location of more information: Packaged with software.
Latest version number: not known.
Brief Scope and Characteristics:
This program provides a simple command line interface to the archie server system for users of VMS.
General comments:
This program should not be confused with the archie system telnet interface, which is a program that runs on the archie server itself.
Future plans: Not known
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Date completed or updated: 1 November, 1993 By: Name: Peter Deutsch Email address: peterd@bunyip.com
Platform: Xwindows client (X11R4)
Primary Contact: Name: George Ferguson Email address: ferguson@cs.rochester.edu Telephone: not known
Client software available from: cs.rochester.edu, most archie server hosts and major Internet archives.
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Look for file "xarchie-1.3.tar.Z".
Location of more information: Packaged with software.
Latest version number: xarchie-1.3
Brief Scope and Characteristics:
This program provides an Xwindows client that allows users to search the archie anonymous FTP database. Also included is the capability of fetching files (using ftp).
General comments: none.
Future plans: Not known
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Date completed or updated: 1 November, 1993 By: Name: Peter Deutsch Email address: peterd@bunyip.com
Platform: NeXTStep client.
Primary Contact: Name: Scott Stark Email address: me@superc.che.udel.edu Telephone: not known
Client software available from: most archie server hosts and major Internet archives. Look for file "NeXTArchie.tar.Z".
Location of more information: Packaged with software.
Latest version number:
Brief Scope and Characteristics:
This program provides a NeXTStep client that allows users to search the archie anonymous FTP database. Also included is the capability of fetching files (using ftp).
Client software should be supported at all of these sites. Additional sites are available. Use the "sites" command in the archie telnet interface at any of the above sites for a more complete lists.
Access details: - telnet to any of the above sites - login as user `archie' (no password is required) - type `help' at the prompt to get started.
Note: Some people forget and use ftp in place of telnet. This will not work. The hint that this is being done is that they claim that a password is needed, not that the site can't be found.
Document Title: What is archie Location details: anonymous FTP from archie.ans.net Site: archie.ans.net Full file name: "pub/archie/doc/whatis.archie" Description: Brief overview of the archie system.
Document Title: archie man pages Location details: anonymous FTP from archie.ans.net Site: archie.ans.net Full file name: "pub/archie/doc/archie.man.*" Description: Manual pages for the archie system telnet interface in various formats (raw ASCII, nroff, compressed, etc.). This document also explains the various search options and other features, so is of use to users of the other archie client programs.
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Document Title: What's New in 3.0 Location details: anonymous FTP from archie.ans.net Site: archie.ans.net Full file name: "pub/archie/doc/whats.new" Description: Description of the changes to archie for the first commercial release
The Internet Gopher protocol is a client/distributed-server document search and retrieval protocol originally developed at the University of Minnesota. Gopher was originally created as a fast, simple, distributed, campus-wide information search and retrieval system; ease of use and implementation has made Gopher increasingly popular on the Internet. Since its original release, many folks on the Internet have contributed to its growth, submitting patches, servers, clients, and linking their local servers into the worldwide network of Gopher servers. Gateways exist to seamlessly access a variety of non-Gopher services such as ftp, WAIS, USENET news, Archie, Z39.50 (1992 rev), X.500 directories, Sybase and Oracle SQL servers, etc. In addition, an "archie for gopherspace" called Veronica (very easy rodent-oriented net-wide index to computerized archives) has been developed at the University of Nevada. Veronica makes it easy to search for items in gopherspace by title.
The gopher protocol is often described as "fiercely simple"; it is connectionless (stateless), and uses TCP reliable streams. A client connects to a server using TCP, and sends a one-line text "selector string". The server responds by returning the item (a file, a directory listing, or a link to some other service) corresponding to the selector string and immediately closing the connection. Items in directory listings are returned as a series of lines terminated by carriage-return line-feed. Each item (line) is defined by a one- character tag to specify the item type, a display string or item-name that the client should display to the user, and a number of tab delimited fields to specify the selector string, host domain name and port number. Because of its simple and connectionless nature, gopher servers make very minimal demands on their host machines and gopher clients are extremely easy to implement.
The users view the Gopher world as a series of networked hierarchical directories much like a familiar filesystem. However, the links define a graph rather than a simple rooted tree. Links in the Gopher graph may define services other than simple files or directories; these include cso (qi) servers, telnet sessions, links to other
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gopher servers, and links to gateway servers.
The information provider's simplest view is that files and directories below a certain root directory on their machine are all visible and available for retrieval by gopher clients. More features like long names, item types, links, and gateway services are available to the more sophisticated information provider.
Servers and clients run on most popular hardware, including Macs, UNIX boxes, PC-DOS boxes. The Internet Gopher name is copyright (c) 1991-1992 by the University of Minnesota. The Internet Gopher protocol is described in an informational RFC (1436) available at better RFC archives everywhere. Extensions to the base gopher protocol allow for associating meta-information with gopher items, alternate views of documents (i.e., text, postscript, rtf, etc.) and electronic forms. Collectively, these extensions are referred to as Gopher+. Gopher+ is upward compatible with the orginal gopher protocol. The gopher software may be retrieved from numerous Gopher or FTP archive sites, including the University of Minnesota Gopher server, the Info-Mac Archive Gopher server, and by anonymous FTP from boombox.micro.umn.edu and sumex-aim.stanford.edu. As of December 1993, about 1/3 of the approximately 4800 Gopher servers on the internet support Gopher+.
What it runs over: Anything you can run TCP/IP over.
Other NIR tools this interworks with:
Z39.50 WAIS variant via WAIS gateway FTP via FTP gateway archie/Prospero via an archie gateway veronica (an archie for gopherspace) NNTP via NNTP gateway Finger (subset of gopher) X.500 via X.500 gateway Z39.50 1992 revision variant via Z39.50 gateway Oracle and Sybase SQL servers via SQL gateway CSO (Ph/Qi) online phone books
Future plans: New user interace metaphor on PowerPC and Pentium-based clients.
Date completed or updated: 14 March, 1994 By: Name: Mark McCahill Email address: mpm@boombox.micro.umn.edu
Platform: UNIX.
Primary Contact: Name: The Internet Gopher Development Team Email address: gopher@micro.umn.edu Telephone: +1-612-625-1300
Server software available from: Via Gopher: U of M Gopher Information About Gopher Gopher Software Distribution Via FTP: boombox.micro.umn.edu
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/pub/gopher/
Location of more information: As above.
Latest version number: (things change fast; please check software distribution)
Brief Scope and Characteristics: Server, index server for WAIS based indices and for NeXT native indexing, tools, gateway code. Supports Gopher+.
Approximate number of such servers in use: Over 3000.
General comments: The defacto standard workhorse Gopher server. Paul Lindner is the architect and keeper of this server.
-------------------
Date completed or updated: 14 March, 1994 By: Name: Mark McCahill Email address: mpm@boombox.micro.umn.edu
Platform: Macintosh.
Primary Contact: Name: The Internet Gopher Development Team Email address: gopher@micro.umn.edu Telephone: +1-612-625-1300
Server software available from: Via Gopher: U of M Gopher Information About Gopher Gopher Software Distribution Via FTP: boombox.micro.umn.edu /pub/gopher/
Location of more information: As above.
Latest version number: (please check software distribution)
Brief Scope and Characteristics: Macintosh Gopher Server and tools, supports Gopher+.
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Approximate number of such servers in use: Current estimates between 300 and 400.
General comments: Runs on any Macintosh with 1MB memory or more. Requires MacTCP. Can be configured to use Apple Computer's AppleSearch full-text search software as a Gopher-accessible search engine.
-------------------
Date completed or updated: 14 March, 1994 By: Name: Mark McCahill Email address: mpm@boombox.micro.umn.edu
Platform: PC-DOS.
Primary Contact: Name: The Internet Gopher Development Team Email address: gopher@micro.umn.edu Telephone: +1-612-625-1300
Additional contacts: Name: Dennis Sherman Email address: Dennis_Sherman@unc.edu
Server software available from: Via Gopher: U of M Gopher Information About Gopher Gopher Software Distribution Via FTP: boombox.micro.umn.edu /pub/gopher/
Location of more information: As above.
Latest version number: 0.91b
Brief Scope and Characteristics: Basic Gopher server for PC-DOS boxes.
Approximate number of such servers in use: Current estimates between 25 and 75.
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General comments: Written by Chris McNeil <cmcneil@mta.ca>, based on Phil Karns net package. The U of M Gopher team forwards difficult problems to Chris.
-------------------
Date completed or updated: 14 March, 1994 By: Name: Mark McCahill Email address: mpm@boombox.micro.umn.edu
Server software available from: Via Gopher: U of M Gopher Information About Gopher Gopher Software Distribution Via FTP: boombox.micro.umn.edu /pub/gopher/VMS/
Location of more information: As above.
Latest version number: 1.2 VMS-0
Brief Scope and Characteristics: Basic VMS Server, shares some code with UNIX server.
Approximate number of such servers in use: 35-40 servers in use.
General comments: The VMS server was written and is maintained by J. Lance Wilkinson, Foteos Macrides, Bruce Tanner and others on the VMSGopher-L@trln.lib.unc.edu mailing list.
-------------------
Date completed or updated: 14 March, 1994 By: Name: Mark McCahill Email address: mpm@boombox.micro.umn.edu
Platform: VM/CMS
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Primary Contact: Name: Rick Troth Email address: TROTH@RICEVM1.RICE.EDU Telephone:
Server software available from: Via Gopher: U of M Gopher Information About Gopher Gopher Software Distribution Via FTP: boombox.micro.umn.edu:/pub/gopher/ Brazos.IS.Rice.EDU:/pub/vmcms/
Location of more information: As above.
Latest version number: 2.4
Brief Scope and Characteristics: Gopher server for IBM VM/CMS installations.
Approximate number of such servers in use: Unknown.
General comments: This server was written and is maintained by Rick Troth. This server is commonly referred to as the Rice VM/CMS server. There is also another VM/CMS server: the Vienna VM/CMS server.
-------------------
Date completed or updated: 14 March, 1994 By: Name: Mark McCahill Email address: mpm@boombox.micro.umn.edu
Platform: VM/CMS.
Primary Contact: Name: Gerhard Gonter Email address: Gerhard.Gonter@WU-Wien.ac.at Telephone:
Server software available from: Via Gopher: U of M Gopher Information About Gopher Gopher Software Distribution Via FTP: boombox.micro.umn.edu:/pub/gopher/
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Location of more information: As above.
Latest version number: 2.00.00
Brief Scope and Characteristics: Gopher server for IBM VM/CMS installations.
Approximate number of such servers in use: Unknown.
General comments: This server was written and is maintained by Gerhard Gonter. This server is commonly referred to as the Vienna VM/CMS server. There is also another VM/CMS server: the Rice VM/CMS server.
-------------------
Date completed or updated: 14 March, 1994 By: Name: Mark McCahill Email address: mpm@boombox.micro.umn.edu
Platform: MVS
Primary Contact: Name: Steve Bacher Email address: seb@draper.com Telephone:
Server software available from: Via Gopher: U of M Gopher Information About Gopher Gopher Software Distribution Via FTP: boombox.micro.umn.edu:/pub/gopher/
Location of more information: As above.
Latest version number: 2.1
Brief Scope and Characteristics: Gopher server for IBM MVS installations.
Approximate number of such servers in use: Unknown.
General comments: This server was written and is maintained by Steve Bacher.
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-------------------
Date completed or updated: 14 March, 1994 By: Name: Mark McCahill Email address: mpm@boombox.micro.umn.edu
Platform: Unix veronica server
Primary Contact: Name: Steve Foster Email address: gophadm@futique.scs.unr.edu Telephone:
Server software available from: Via FTP: veronica.scs.unr.edu:/veronica
Location of more information: As above.
Latest version number: (please check software distribution)
Brief Scope and Characteristics: veronica server software
Approximate number of such servers in use: Unknown.
General comments: Written and maintained by Steve Foster at the University of Nevada.
Future plans: Additional support for searching on Gopher+ attributes
Date completed or updated: 14 March, 1994 By: Name: Mark McCahill Email address: mpm@boombox.micro.umn.edu
Platform: Macintosh
Primary Contact Name: The Internet Gopher Development Team Email address: gopher@micro.umn.edu Telephone: +1-612-625-1300
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Client software available from: Via Gopher: U of M Gopher Information About Gopher Gopher Software Distribution Via FTP: boombox.micro.umn.edu /pub/gopher/
Location of more information: As above.
Latest version number: (please check software distribution)
Brief Scope and Characteristics: One of the many Macintosh Gopher clients. Requires MacTCP.
General comments: Macintosh TurboGopher is as of this writing, the fastest Gopher client available for the Mac. Written by the Minnesota Gopher Development Team. Supports Gopher+.
-------------------
Date completed or updated: 14 March, 1994 By: Name: Mark McCahill Email address: mpm@boombox.micro.umn.edu
Platform: Macintosh
Primary Contact: Name: Don Gilbert, Biology, Indiana University - Bloomington Email address: Software@Bio.Indiana.Edu Telephone:
Client software available from: Via Gopher: Indiana University Gopher Server IUBio Software+Data/GopherApp, Mac Gopher client Via FTP: ftp.bio.indiana.edu:/util/gopher/ gopherapp/
Location of more information: As above.
Latest version number: (please check software distribution)
Brief Scope and Characteristics: One of the many Macintosh Gopher clients. Requires MacTCP.
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General comments: Written and maintained by Don Gilbert. Supports Gopher+.
Future plans:
-------------------
Date completed or updated: 14 March, 1994 By: Name: Mark McCahill Email address: mpm@boombox.micro.umn.edu
Client software available from: Via Gopher: gopher.cc.utah.edu in Testing directory
Via FTP: ftp.cc.utah.edu:/pub/gopher/Macintosh/
Location of more information: As above.
Latest version number: (please check software distribution)
Brief Scope and Characteristics: One of the many Macintosh Gopher clients. Requires MacTCP. Has a browser style interface. Uses customized Telnet application.
General comments: Written and maintained by "Jonzy".
Future plans:
-------------------
Date completed or updated: 14 March, 1994 By: Name: Mark McCahill Email address: mpm@boombox.micro.umn.edu
Platform: UNIX (curses/EMACS based client)
Primary Contact: Name: The Internet Gopher Development Team
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Client software available from: Via Gopher: U of M Gopher Information About Gopher Gopher Software Distribution Via FTP: boombox.micro.umn.edu /pub/gopher/
Location of more information: As above.
Latest version number: (please check software distribution)
Brief Scope and Characteristics: The UNIX curses-based client.
General comments: Written and maintained by Paul Lindner. Supports Gopher+.
-------------------
Date completed or updated: 14 March, 1994 By: Name: Mark McCahill Email address: mpm@boombox.micro.umn.edu
Platform: UNIX (simple client does not use CURSES)
Primary Contact: Name: Sean Fuller Email address: fuller@aedc-vax.af.mil Telephone:
Client software available from: Via Gopher: U of M Gopher Information About Gopher Gopher Software Distribution Via FTP: boombox.micro.umn.edu /pub/gopher/
Location of more information: As above.
Latest version number: 0.3
Brief Scope and Characteristics: sgopher is a simple gopher client for inetd/batch/online; it does not
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require much of the terminal other than it be 80X24 characters. It can be run stand alone or it can be launched from inetd. It doesn't use termcap or curses. Sgopher outputs the \r\n pair at the end of line and requires a <return> after each command to support more terminal types.
General comments: Runs on VMS, IRIX, Ultrix, AIX, Solaris 2.x, Solaris 1.x
Future plans:
-------------------
Date completed or updated: 14 March, 1994 By: Name: Mark McCahill Email address: mpm@boombox.micro.umn.edu
Platform: Xgopher: UNIX XWindows based client
Primary Contact: Name: Allan Tuchman Email address: tuchman@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu Telephone:
Client software available from: Via Gopher: U of M Gopher Information About Gopher Gopher Software Distribution Via FTP: boombox.micro.umn.edu /pub/gopher/
Location of more information: As above.
Latest version number: (please check software distribution)
Brief Scope and Characteristics: Makes use of the X interface.
General comments: Written and maintained by Allan Tuchman.
Future plans: Gopher+ support planned for the future.
-------------------
Date completed or updated: 14 March, 1994 By: Name: Mark McCahill
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Email address: mpm@boombox.micro.umn.edu
Platform: Xgopher: UNIX XWindows based client
Primary Contact: Name: Andrew Scherpbier Email address: xvgopher@gopher.sdsu.edu turtle@sciences.sdsu.edu Telephone:
Client software available from: Via Gopher: U of M Gopher Information About Gopher Gopher Software Distribution Via FTP: boombox.micro.umn.edu /pub/gopher/
Location of more information: As above.
Latest version number: (please check software distribution)
Brief Scope and Characteristics: Makes use of the X interface... displays a way cool chewing gopher icon while information is being downloaded.
General comments: XView based gopher client.
Future plans: Gopher+ support.
-------------------
Date completed or updated: 14 March, 1994 By: Name: Mark McCahill Email address: mpm@boombox.micro.umn.edu
Platform: NeXT: NeXTstep client
Primary Contact: Name: The Internet Gopher Development Team Email address: gopher@micro.umn.edu Telephone: +1-612-625-1300
Client software available from: Via Gopher: U of M Gopher Information About Gopher Gopher Software Distribution
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Via FTP: boombox.micro.umn.edu /pub/gopher/
Location of more information: As above.
Latest version number: (please check software distribution)
Brief Scope and Characteristics: Makes full use of the NeXT interface.
General comments: Initial version written by Max Tardiveau. Now maintained by Paul Lindner.
Future plans:
-------------------------
Date completed or updated: 14 March, 1994 By: Name: Mark McCahill Email address: mpm@boombox.micro.umn.edu
Platform: DOS TurboVision w/Clarkson packet drivers
Primary Contact: Name: The Internet Gopher Development Team Email address: gopher@micro.umn.edu Telephone: +1-612-625-1300
Client software available from: Via Gopher: U of M Gopher Information About Gopher Gopher Software Distribution Via FTP: boombox.micro.umn.edu /pub/gopher/
Location of more information: As above.
Latest version number: (please check software distribution)
Brief Scope and Characteristics: Character-based graphics and windows under DOS. Uses either Clarkson Packet drivers (CRWYN packet drivers) and a built-in TCP/IP protocol stack or Ftp, Inc.'s protocol stack (PC/TCP).
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General comments: Gopher+ support.
-------------------
Date completed or updated: 14 March, 1994 By: Name: Mark McCahill Email address: mpm@boombox.micro.umn.edu
Platform: VMS.
Primary Contact: Name: Mark Van Overbeke Email address: mark@ummvxm.mrs.umn.edu Telephone:
Client software available from: Via Gopher: U of M Gopher Information About Gopher Gopher Software Distribution Via FTP: boombox.micro.umn.edu /pub/gopher/
Location of more information: As above.
Latest version number: 0.6
Brief Scope and Characteristics:
General comments: The VMS client was written and is maintained by Mark Van Overbeke.
Future plans:
-------------------
Date completed or updated: 14 March, 1994 By: Name: Mark McCahill Email address: mpm@boombox.micro.umn.edu
Platform: VMS.
Primary Contact: Name: The Internet Gopher Development Team Email address: gopher@micro.umn.edu Telephone: +1-612-625-1300
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Client software available from: Via Gopher: U of M Gopher Information About Gopher Gopher Software Distribution Via FTP: boombox.micro.umn.edu /pub/gopher/
Location of more information: As above.
Latest version number: 1.12
Brief Scope and Characteristics: Identical to Unix gopher1.12. Works on a VMS 5.5-2 system running MultiNet 3.1B. UCX and Wollongong are also supported.
General comments: A port of the University of Minnesota Unix client to VMS.
Future plans:
-------------------
Date completed or updated: 14 March, 1994 By: Name: Mark McCahill Email address: mpm@boombox.micro.umn.edu
Platform: VM/CMS.
Primary Contact: Name: Rick Troth Email address: TROTH@RICEVM1.RICE.EDU Telephone:
Client software available from:
Via Gopher: U of M Gopher Information About Gopher Gopher Software Distribution Via FTP: boombox.micro.umn.edu /pub/gopher/
Location of more information: As above.
Latest version number: (please check software distribution)
Brief Scope and Characteristics:
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Gopher client for IBM VM/CMS installations.
General comments: This client was written and is maintained by Rick Troth. This client is commonly referred to as the Rice VM/CMS client. There is also another VM/CMS client: the Vienna VM/CMS client.
Future plans:
-------------------
Date completed or updated: 14 March, 1994 By: Name: Mark McCahill Email address: mpm@boombox.micro.umn.edu
Platform: VM/CMS.
Primary Contact: Name: Gerhard Gonter Email address: Gerhard.Gonter@WU-Wien.ac.at Telephone:
Client software available from: Via Gopher: U of M Gopher Information About Gopher Gopher Software Distribution Via FTP: boombox.micro.umn.edu /pub/gopher/
Location of more information: As above.
Latest version number: (please check software distribution)
Brief Scope and Characteristics: Gopher client for IBM VM/CMS installations.
General comments: This client was written and is maintained by Gerhard Gonter. This client is commonly referred to as the Vienna VM/CMS client. There is also another VM/CMS client: the Rice VM/CMS client.
Future plans:
-------------------
Date completed or updated: 14 March, 1994 By: Name: Mark McCahill
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Email address: mpm@boombox.micro.umn.edu
Platform: DOS with PC/TCP.
Primary Contact: Name: Steven E. Newton Email address: snewton@oac.hsc.uth.tmc.edu Telephone:
Client software available from: Via FTP: oac.hsc.uth.tmc.edu:/public/dos/misc/
Location of more information: As above.
Latest version number: (please check software distribution)
Brief Scope and Characteristics: Gopher client for DOS with PC/TCP
General comments: Written and maintained by Steven E. Newton
Future plans:
-------------------
Date completed or updated: 14 March, 1994 By: Name: Mark McCahill Email address: mpm@boombox.micro.umn.edu
Platform: DOS with PC-NFS.
Primary Contact: Name: Stan Barber Email address: sob@TMC.EDU Telephone:
Client software available from: Via FTP: bcm.tmc.edu:/nfs/gopher.exe
Location of more information: As above.
Latest version number: (please check software distribution)
Brief Scope and Characteristics: Gopher client for DOS with PC-NFS
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General comments: Written and maintained by Stan Barber
Future plans:
-------------------
Date completed or updated: 14 March, 1994 By: Name: Mark McCahill Email address: mpm@boombox.micro.umn.edu
Platform: DOS Novell LWP Gopher Client
Primary Contact: Name: Jeremy T. James Email address: blackp@med.umich.edu Telephone:
Client software available from: Via FTP: lennon.itn.med.umich.edu:pub/gopher
Location of more information: As above.
Latest version number: (please check software distribution)
Brief Scope and Characteristics: DOS Novell LWP Gopher Client
General comments: Written and maintained by Jeremy T. James.
Future plans:
-------------------
Date completed or updated: 14 March, 1994 By: Name: Mark McCahill Email address: mpm@boombox.micro.umn.edu
RFC 1689 Networked Information Retrieval: Tools and Groups August 1994
Via Gopher: U of M Gopher Information About Gopher Gopher Software Distribution Via FTP: lister.cc.ic.ac.uk /pub/wingopher
Location of more information: As above.
Latest version number: (please check software distribution)
Brief Scope and Characteristics: Gopher client for Windows; uses either Winsock DLL or PC/NFS network interface.
General comments: Written and maintained by Martyn Hampson. Gopher+ support.
Future plans:
-------------------
Date completed or updated: 14 March, 1994 By: Name: Mark McCahill Email address: mpm@boombox.micro.umn.edu
Platform: Windows with Winsock and ToolBook.
Primary Contact: Name: Kevin Gamiel Email address: kgamiel@kudzu.cnidr.org Telephone:
Client software available from: Via Gopher: U of M Gopher Information About Gopher Gopher Software Distribution Via FTP: sunsite.unc.edu /pub/micro/pc-stuff/ms-windows/winsock/gophbook.zip
Location of more information: As above.
Latest version number: 1.0
Brief Scope and Characteristics: Gopher client for Windows; uses Asymetrix's ToolBook to paint the screen and speaks to the network via a Winsock DLL.
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General comments: Written and maintained by Kevin Gamiel
Future plans:
------------------------------
Date completed or updated: 14 March, 1994 By: Name: Mark McCahill Email address: mpm@boombox.micro.umn.edu
Platform: Air Gopher commercial client for windows
Primary Contact: Name: David Pool, Spry Software, Inc. Email address: dave@spry.com Telephone: +1-206-447-0300
Client software available from:
Location of more information:
Latest version number:
Brief Scope and Characteristics:
General Comments:
Future plans: Gopher+ support planned.
------------------------------
Date completed or updated: 14 March, 1994 By: Name: Mark McCahill Email address: mpm@boombox.micro.umn.edu
Platform: Win Gopher
Primary Contact: Name: Bill Easton, Notis, Inc. Telephone: +1-708-866-0159
Client software available from:
Location of more information:
Latest version number:
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Brief Scope and Characteristics:
General Comments: Requires Winsock. Supports gopher.
Future plans: Gopher+ support planned.
------------------------------
Date completed or updated: 14 March, 1994
By: Name: Mark McCahill Email address: mpm@boombox.micro.umn.edu
Platform: GINA
Primary Contact: Name: Mark Resmer, California Technology Project Email address: resmer@eis.calstale.edu
Client software available from:
Location of more information:
Latest version number:
Brief Scope and Characteristics:
General Comments: Macintosh and windows clients include netnews, email.
List of sites which are willing to act as demonstration sites for this application.
site name ip address login as serving area ---------------------------------------------------------------- consultant.micro.umn.edu 134.84.132.4 gopher North America gopher.uiuc.edu 128.174.33.160 gopher North America panda.uiowa.edu 128.255.40.201 panda North America info.anu.edu.au 150.203.84.20 info Australia
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gopher.chalmers.se 129.16.221.40 gopher Sweden tolten.puc.cl 146.155.1.16 gopher South America
Title: (1) Gopher Protocol and (2) Gopher+ Proposed Extensions Location details: Via Gopher: U of M Gopher Information About Gopher Gopher Software Distribution Via FTP: boombox.micro.umn.edu /pub/gopher/
Title: RFC 1436 The Internet Gopher Protocol (a distributed document search and retrieval protocol) Via FTP: nic.ddn.mil /rfc/rfc1436.txt
The Internet Gopher, "ConneXions", July 1992, Interop.
Exploring Internet GopherSpace "The Internet Society News", v1n2 1992
The Internet Gopher Protocol, Proceedings of the Twenty-Third IETF, CNRI, Section 5.3
Internet Gopher, Proceedings of Canadian Networking '92
The Internet Gopher, INTERNET: Getting Started, SRI International, Section 10.5.5
Tools help Internet users discover on-line treasures, Computerworld, July 20, 1992
TCP/IP Network Administration, O'Reilly.
Balakrishan, B. (Oct 1992) "SPIGopher: Making SPIRES databases accessible through the Gopher protocol". SPIRES Fall '92 Workshop, Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
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HYTELNET is a terminate-and-stay-resident hypertext browser, which gives a user full instructions for logging into telnet-accessible sites on the Internet i.e., library catalogs, campus-wide information systems, bulletin boards, directory services, gophers, etc. The browser does not make remote connections. A Unix/VMS version, which does make remote connections, has been written by Earl Fogel, Computing Services, University of Saskatchewan. Macintosh and Amiga versions are also available (see ftp site information below).
Administration: By listowner Peter Scott aa375@freenet.carleton.ca
Description:
To inform members of new versions of the software, and to keep users informed of new/changed/defunct Telnet-accessible sites To subscribe send e-mail message to listserv@kentvm.kent.edu with no subject, and sub hytel-l firstname lastname as the body of the message.
HYTELNET as software for accessing the Internet: a personal perspective on the development of HYTELNET. Electronic Networking, Vol. 2, No. 1 Spring 1992 pp 38-44
Hypertext...Information at your fingertips. In: Designing Information: new roles for librarians. Graduate School of Library and Information Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1993
Given the name of a person on the Internet and a rough description of where the person works, Netfind attempts to locate information about the person. People can be specified by first, last, or login name. Their place of work can be described by name and/or the city/state/country.
Netfind provides textual information about people, when it is able to locate such information. It is not a directory in the usual sense of the word. Rather, it searches for people using a number of Internet services and heuristics about how to locate user information. Because of the techniques it uses, Netfind can locate information about more people than any other Internet user directory - over 5 million people in over 9,000 domains worldwide when last measured.
You can use the University of Colorado Netfind server by telnet to bruno.cs.colorado.edu: login as "netfind" (with no password). Help screens providing more detailed instructions and technical information are available there. There is currently no way for non- Internet users to access Netfind (e.g., using an email interface).
There are an increasing number of Netfind servers being set up at various Network Information Centers (including the U.S. Internic). However, since Netfind is provided as a volunteer service at this time, there is no help line.
None. Netfind was originally a research prototype. It is offered as-is, on an unsupported basis. From time to time the original developers make improvements, but it is not currently funded.
What is supported: NVT ASCII. At present no formal protocol is used. We are currently implementing a client/ server protocol, which will allow better clients and more efficient servers.
What it runs over: TCP/IP.
Other NIR tools this interworks with: Finger, Gopher, PH, SMTP, USENET news, UUCP maps, Various NIC databases, Various service logs, WAIS, WHOIS, X.500, DNS
Future plans:
Many. Telnet to the server and see the "Future Directions" menu under the "Frequently Asked Questions" help menu.
In addition to the above list, we are currently exploring possibilities to integrate the Netfind seed database gathering mechanisms into the Fremont framework, to make the process more scalable, and to support other types of information (e.g., to help with mapping the Internet).
Server software available from: ftp.cs.colorado.edu, in the
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directory pub/cs/distribs/netfind.
Location of more information: in above directory.
Latest version number: 4.4.
Brief Scope and Characteristics:
This version of Netfind incorporates the ability for sites to register a set of URLs in their DNS server, pointing Netfind to a variety of different sources for information. Netfind can now tap information from X.500, WHOIS, and PH, in addition to the previous sources it used (finger, etc.). For more information see ftp://ftp.cs.colorado.edu/pub/cs/distribs/netfind/Netfind.WP.URLs
Approximate number of such servers in use:
17 public servers; hundreds or thousands of private stand-alone clients.
Demonstration sites: Site name: bruno.cs.colorado.edu The current list is: archie.au (AARNet, Melbourne, Australia) bruno.cs.colorado.edu (University of Colorado, Boulder) dino.conicit.ve (Nat. Council for Techn. & Scien. Research, Venezuela) ds.internic.net (InterNIC Directory and DB Services, S. Plainfield, NJ) eis.calstate.edu (California State University, Fullerton, CA) lincoln.technet.sg (Technet Unit, Singapore) malloco.ing.puc.cl (Catholic University of Chile, Santiago) monolith.cc.ic.ac.uk (Imperial College, London, England) mudhoney.micro.umn.edu (University of Minnesota, Minneapolis) netfind.anu.edu.au (Australian National University, Canberra) netfind.ee.mcgill.ca (McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada) netfind.if.usp.br (University of Sao Paulo, Sao Paulo, Brazil) netfind.oc.com (OpenConnect Systems, Dallas, Texas) netfind.vslib.cz (Liberec University of Technology, Czech Republic) nic.nm.kr (Korea Network Information Center, Taejon, Korea)
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nic.uakom.sk (Academy of Sciences, Banska Bystrica, Slovakia) redmont.cis.uab.edu (University of Alabama at Birmingham)
There are three primary sets of information available about Netfind. The first is a set of help information, available in the FTP distribution as well as from the help screens available from any Netfind server. This information includes a fairly complete set of Frequently Asked Questions, as well as user help information and pointers to other related information. The second is a pre-publication version of a technical paper about Netfind, available in
containing some of the original ideas in Netfind and measurements of the system. The Netfind.Gathering paper contains an up-to-date description of the data gathering and integration algorithms.
The third source of information focuses particularly on the URL-based remote site customization mechanism, and is available in ftp://ftp.cs.colorado.edu/pub/cs/distribs/netfind/Netfind.WP.URLs
Netfind is one prototype developed by the Networked Resource Discovery Project, at the University of Colorado - Boulder. A bibliography and set of project papers is available by anonymous FTP from
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ftp.cs.colorado.edu, in pub/cs/techreports/schwartz. This directory contains a file called "README" that contains a project overview and bibliography. The files in this directory are also available via an electronic mail interface. For more information, send a mail message to infosrv@ftp.cs.colorado.edu, containing the message body (not subject line) "send HELP" (without quotes).
The Prospero directory service supports a user centered view of files scattered across the Internet. It can be used to organize references to files as if they were on your local system, without the need to physically move them.
Prospero provides access to existing directories and indices that can be used to find files of interest that are available from Internet archive sites. Among the indices available is the archie database and a gateway to all Gopher menus, files, and searches. We hope to have WAIS indices and World Wide Web documents online in the near future.
Prospero also provides a mechanism to make directories and indices available to end-users and applications in a format that allows information from different sources to be integrated into a coherent whole.
Prospero does not interpret the data that it organizes. It does provide mechanisms to retrieve the data, but the display and use of the data is up to the user's application. Prospero is intended to serve as infrastructure that integrates information from a variety of sources and supports a variety of user applications.
Prospero allows fine grained authorization of requests to all objects, including directories and indices. Prospero supports the authentication of clients through four mechanisms: (a) simple client assertion of the user's identity; (b) a trusted port mechanism similar to that used by the Berkeley UNIX R commands; (c) a simple cleartext passwording mechanism; (d) Kerberos (version 5). The maintainer of an ACL chooses which of these mechanisms he or she wishes to accept as proof of the client's identity.
Information Sciences Institute, University of Southern California
The design and implementation was supported in part by the National Science Foundation (Grant No. CCR-8619663), the Washington Technology Center, Digital Equipment Corporation, and the Advanced Research Projects Agency under NASA Cooperative Agreement NCC-2-539.
Description: This mailing list is really two one-way mailing lists. Send mail to INFO-PROSPERO to obtain information about Prospero, papers, or the release. Mail to INFO-PROSPERO will not be passed on to subscribers. INFO-PROSPERO is also the list to which we will send status updates and information on how to obtain new releases.
Archive: Via anonymous FTP to PROSPERO.ISI.EDU as /pub/prospero/mail/info-prospero.arc
Via Prospero in the "#/INET/EDU/ISI/GUEST/prototype" virtual system as /sites/isi.edu/pub/prospero/mail/info-prospero.arc
--------------------------
Address: prospero@ISI.EDU
Administration: prospero-request@ISI.EDU
Description: This mailing list is for general discussion of Prospero, for announcements of new sites that have come on board, and for announcements of directories that people have created to organize the information already accessible.
Archive: Via anonymous FTP to PROSPERO.ISI.EDU as /pub/prospero/mail/prospero.arc
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Via Prospero in the "#/INET/EDU/ISI/GUEST/prototype" virtual system as /sites/isi.edu/pub/prospero/mail/prospero.arc.
What is supported: Prospero directory service requests are formatted according to the Prospero protocol.
Prospero does not have its own file retrieval protocol. Files may be automatically retrieved using FTP, NFS, AFS, and GOPHER. Loginable services may also be accessed via TELNET.
What it runs over: Directory service requests are layered on top of UDP, with our own (included) reliable message delivery layer.
Other NIR tools this interworks with: Archie, Gopher, Wais, WWW
Primary Contact: Name: Clifford Neuman and Steven Augart Email address: info-prospero@isi.edu Telephone: +1-310-822-1511
Server software available from:
Via anonymous FTP: PROSPERO.ISI.EDU, /pub/prospero/prospero.tar.Z
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Via Prospero: /releases/prospero/prospero.tar.Z, in the "#/INET/EDU/ISI/GUEST/prototype" virtual system.
Note that the name prospero.tar.Z refers to the most stable release (currently Beta version 5.1). If you want the latest version of the server (which includes the Gopher gateway), you should retrieve it by version number; the name for the latest version is prospero-alpha.5.2.tar.Z
Location of more information: Contained within the release.
Latest version number: Alpha Version 5.3
Brief Scope and Characteristics:
The server allows the maintainer to make directory information available about selected portions of the server's filesystem, such as anonymously FTPable files. The server also is used to publish information from other databases, such as Archie. The server also allows users and maintainers to store their own customized organizing views of the namespace. Release Alpha.5.2 of the server includes a gateway feature which treats all Gopher servers as a Prospero database.
Approximate number of such servers in use:
50
General comments:
Future plans:
We have a prototype NFS server that makes Prospero queries, but it is not yet ready to release. We plan to develop a gateway similar to the existing Gopher gateway feature for World Wide Web. There is also active work being done on exporting WAIS indices through Prospero in a way similar to the way the archie database is exported.
RFC 1689 Networked Information Retrieval: Tools and Groups August 1994
Primary Contact Name: Clifford Neuman and Steven Augart Email address: info-prospero@isi.edu Telephone: +1-310-822-1511
Client software available from: Via anonymous FTP: PROSPERO.ISI.EDU, /pub/prospero/prospero.tar.Z
Via Prospero: /releases/prospero/prospero.tar.Z, in the "#/INET/EDU/ISI/swa" virtual system.
Note that the name prospero.tar.Z refers to the most stable release (currently Beta version 5.1). If you want the latest version of the clients (which includes the Prospero menu browser), you should retrieve it by version number; the name for the latest version is prospero-alpha.5.2.tar.Z Latest Version number: Alpha Version 5.2
Brief Scope and Characteristics:
We provide two client interfaces. The older one is a command-line client, which can be configured to use the same syntax to navigate through the Prospero namespace that a user uses to navigate through the UNIX filesystem. ("cd", "ls", etc.) The newer one is a menu- based file and directory browser similar to the UNIX Gopher client.
General comments:
Archie clients also make queries in the Prospero namespace, so all Archie clients are Prospero clients too. They are better described in the Archie report.
Future plans:
We are working on enhancing the menu browser client to allow users to remotely customize and update virtual systems. We plan to develop a Prospero hypertext browser.
A guest virtual system is available on PROSPERO.ISI.EDU. However, to use it, you must compile the Prospero command-line client on your own machine. Instructions for using it come with the Prospero distribution.
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All of these papers are available via anonymous FTP from PROSPERO.ISI.EDU. They may additionally be obtained through Prospero itself by preceding the 'Full file name:' given below with '/sites/isi.edu' and looking in the '#/INET/EDU/ISI/GUEST/prototype' virtual system.
Document Title: The Prospero Protocol, version 5 Location details: Site: PROSPERO.ISI.EDU Full file name: /pub/prospero/doc/prospero-protocol.PS.Z
A bibliography listing all publicly available Prospero documents and papers is available via anonymous FTP from PROSPERO.ISI.EDU as /pub/prospero/README-prospero-documents The following papers are also available via anonymous FTP from PROSPERO.ISI.EDU:
RFC 1689 Networked Information Retrieval: Tools and Groups August 1994
AUTHOR = "Neuman, B. Clifford and Augart, Steven Seger", TITLE = "Prospero: A Base for Building Information Infrastructure", BOOKTITLE = "Proceedings of INET'93", YEAR = 1993, MONTH = "August"}
For the readers of this report, this is the first paper you probably want to read about Prospero. This paper describes how Prospero can be used to integrate internet information services, including Gopher, WAIS, Archie, and World Wide Web. The paper was presented at INET'93 in August.
Prospero:/papers/subjects/operating-systems/prospero/prospero-oir.ps.Z Anonymous FTP: /pub/prospero/papers/prospero-oir.ps.Z (POSTSCRIPT) @ARTICLE{oir, AUTHOR = "Neuman, B. Clifford", TITLE = "Prospero: A Tool for Organizing {I}nternet Resources", JOURNAL = "Electronic Networking: Research, Applications and Policy", MONTH = "Spring", YEAR = 1992, VOLUME = 2, NUMBER = 1}
This is the first paper we give to more general computer science audiences to read. It's also a good first paper to look at. It gives a good overview of Prospero and what it does. It also describes a bit about the Virtual System model, of which Prospero is a prototype implementation. Describes what Prospero does, not how it does it.
Anonymous FTP: /pub/prospero/papers/prospero-gfsvsm.ps.Z (POSTSCRIPT) @INPROCEEDINGS{gfsvsm, AUTHOR = "Neuman, B. Clifford", TITLE = "The {P}rospero {F}ile {S}ystem: A Global File System based on the {V}irtual {S}ystem {M}odel", BOOKTITLE = "Proceedings of the Workshop on File Systems", YEAR = 1992, MONTH = "May"}
This is a good third paper to read about Prospero. This one is targeted more toward system implementors. It provides more implementation details than the paper on organizing Internet resources, but less of the vision of how Prospero can be used together with other systems.
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Prospero: /papers/subjects/operating-systems/prospero/prospero-smlic.ps.Z Anonymous FTP: /pub/papers/prospero/prospero-smlic.ps.Z (POSTSCRIPT) @INPROCEEDINGS{prosperosmlic, AUTHOR = "Neuman, B. Clifford and Augart, Steven Seger and Upasani, Shantaprasad", TITLE = "Using Prospero to Support Integrated Location-Independent Computing", BOOKTITLE = "Proceedings of the Usenix Symposium on Mobile and Location-Independent Computing", YEAR = 1993, MONTH = "August"}
This paper describes how the Prospero Directory Service can be used to solve the server selection problem and the user location problem. The paper was presented in August at the Usenix Symposium on Mobile and Location-Independent Computing.
Anonymous FTP: /pub/prospero/papers/UW-CS-89-01-07.PS.Z (POSTSCRIPT) @TECHREPORT{vsmldos, AUTHOR = "Neuman, B. Clifford", TITLE = "The {V}irtual {S}ystem {M}odel for Large Distributed Operating Systems", INSTITUTION = "Department of Computer Science, University of Washington", YEAR = 1989, MONTH = "April", NUMBER = "89-01-07"}
This describes the initial vision for the Virtual System Model, the model on which Prospero is based. Much of the material in this paper appears in greater detail in other papers.
Anonymous FTP: /pub/prospero/papers/UW-CSE-90-05-01.PS.Z (POSTSCRIPT) @TECHREPORT{vsmtp, AUTHOR = "Neuman, B. Clifford", TITLE = "The {V}irtual {S}ystem {M}odel: A Scalable Approach to Organizing Large Systems (A Thesis Proposal)", INSTITUTION = "Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Washington", YEAR = 1990, MONTH = "May", NUMBER = "90-05-01"}
for a long time this was the best description of Prospero, but
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all the information in this document appears in more recent papers and the dissertation itself.
Anonymous FTP: /pub/prospero/papers/prospero-closure.ps.Z (POSTSCRIPT) @ARTICLE{nfclosure, AUTHOR = "Neuman, B. Clifford", TITLE = "The Need for Closure in Large Distributed Systems", JOURNAL = "Operating Systems Review", MONTH = "October", YEAR = 1989, VOLUME = 23, NUMBER = 4, PAGES = "28--30"}
This paper describes the reasons that operating systems need to support closure, that is they need to make it clear which name space is to be used when resolving names. While closure is one of the important features of Prospero, the concept should be applied in other operating systems too.
Prospero: /papers/subjects/operating-systems/prospero/prospero-neuman-thesis.ps.Z Anonymous FTP: /pub/prospero/papers/prospero-neuman-thesis.ps.Z (POSTSCRIPT) @PHDTHESIS{phdneuman, AUTHOR = "Neuman, B. Clifford", TITLE = "The {V}irtual {S}ystem {M}odel: A Scalable Approach to Organizing Large Systems", SCHOOL = "University of Washington", MONTH = "June", YEAR = 1992, NOTE = "Department of Computer Science and Engineering Technical Report 92-06-04"}
This is Clifford Neuman's Ph.D. Dissertation. It is currently the definitive work on Prospero and the Virtual System Model. Includes an obsolete version of the Prospero User's Manual and of the Prospero Protocol Specification.
We provide three documented library interfaces to Prospero in order to make client writing easy.
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The PFS and PCOMPAT libraries are documented in the library reference manual. The PFS library allows one to directly make Prospero requests and parse the results and to manipulate Prospero objects as abstractions. The PCOMPAT library is an interface to the PFS library which uses the same interface as the UNIX filesystem; one can link many existing programs with the PCOMPAT library in order to get it to resolve names in the Prospero namespace. It is not as portable as the PFS library and does not provide as much functionality.
The third library interface is the menu-browser API library. It is documented in the menu-based browser API manual and is used by our menu-based browser.
veronica: Very Easy Rodent-Oriented Net-wide Index to Computerized Archives.
veronica is the comprehensive title-index of the world's gopher servers. Because of veronica, the Gopher web is a search-and- retrieval system as well as a browsing system. veronica is popular because the ubiquitous Gopher client can both access the search server, and provide immediate access to the discovered resources. Taking advantage of Gopher's linked menus, and of the policy of open access at most gopher sites, veronica finds and indexes almost all items on publicly-accessible gopher servers.
As of February, 1994, veronica holds indexes to more than 3200 gopher servers on approximately 2500 internet hosts. In February 1994 the public-access veronica sites served an estimated 1,200,000 queries. Most queries are resolved in less than twenty seconds. Eight server sites offer searches to the internet community, and several other institutions run servers for internal access.
veronica is easily accessed via any Gopher client. It offers various types of searches, ranging from single-keyword searches to boolean queries of indefinite complexity.
A veronica search originates with a user's request for a search, submitted from a gopher client. The searches may include boolean operators ( AND, OR, NOT, and parentheses ) and several options to control the number of items returned, and to restrict the search to certain gopher types. The result of a veronica search is a set of gopher-type data items, which is returned to the gopher client as a gopher menu. Each item on this menu contains the user's desired keyword or keywords in the item title.
The user can access any of the gopher items by selecting from the returned menu. Items on this menu may be drawn from many gopher servers. Because veronica is accessed through gopher clients, it provides immediate access to all types of data supported by the
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gopher protocol and the client implementation.
The veronica service comprises two functions:
1) Harvesting menu data from gopher servers, and preparing it for use; 2) Offering searches of that database to gopher clients.
These two functions are not necessarily provided by the same host computer. Currently collection and preparation of data are done at University of Nevada, and datasets are distributed to the other veronica servers.
The veronica service infrastructure has been fairly stable since July, 1993, with eight server sites offering searches for the internet community (March 1994). These servers are supported by the participating institutions: NYSERNET, PSI, SERRA, CNIDR, University of Koeln, SUNET, University of Bergen and the University of Nevada System Computing Services. Several additional servers offer searches with access limited to internal users; in this class are servers at MSU, SUNET, and the Australian University system.
An auxiliary tool to build a locally held menu of Public available has been created. Called "maltshop", it has been distributed since January, 1994. It appears that maltshop is rapidly being accepted, but its long-term effect on loading of the servers may be problematic.
Name: veronica development team Email address: veronica@veronica.scs.unr.edu Postal Address: VERONICA development team SCS Computer Center Building mailstop 270 University of Nevada, Reno Reno, NV 89557-0023 Telephone: +1-702-784-4292 or +1-702-784-6557 Fax: +1-702-784-1108
Name: Fred Barrie Email address: barrie@cs.unr.edu Postal Address: SCS Computer Center Building mailstop 270 University of Nevada, Reno Reno, NV 89557-0023
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Telephone: +1-702-784-4292 or +1-702-784-6557 Fax: +1-702-784-1108
Name: Steven Foster Email address: foster@nevada.edu Postal Address: SCS Computer Center Building mailstop 270 University of Nevada, Reno Reno, NV 89557-0023 Telephone: +1-702-784-4292 or +1-702-784-6557 Fax: +1-702-784-1108
University and Community College System of Nevada Computer Services, and University of Nevada, Reno. Additional support has been provided by CNIDR, Pandora Systems, Inc., and Pacific Bell Co. Server hosts have been provided by the sites listed above in the Description section.
What is supported: Gopher protocol, Gopher+ protocol
What it runs over: TCP
Other NIR tools this interworks with: Gopher, WAIS, ftp
Future plans: Implement extensions with Gopher+. Support for URN/URL standards. Per-site updates of indexes. Subject-area-specific indexes. Indexes for USENET news and LISTSERV articles. Automated server load-levelling.
Date completed or updated: February 28, 1994 By: Name: Steven Foster Email address: foster@nevada.edu
Platform: UNIX
Primary Contact: Name: veronica development team Email address: veronica@veronica.scs.unr.edu Telephone: +1-702-784-4292 or +1-702-784-6557
Server software available from:
Via ftp: veronica.scs.unr.edu veronica-code/ veronica-data/ veronica-data.tar.Z
Location of more information: Via Gopher: veronica.scs.unr.edu veronica/
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veronica-faq how-to-compose-veronica-queries
Via Gopher: gopher.cnidr.org veronica veronica-faq how-to-compose-veronica-queries
Via ftp: veronica.scs.unr.edu veronica-code/ veronica-docs/
Latest version number: 0.6.5 Next planned version: 0.7b (March 1994)
Brief Scope and Characteristics:
Two modules: a data-collection module and a data-server module.
1. Data-collector runs on any Unix computer that does TCP and compiles perl. This has not been distributed yet. Data collection, data preparation, and indexing are being done at veronica.scs.unr.edu. The harvester "walks" all advertised gopher servers, and any newly-discovered servers. Almost all redundant links are removed, leaving the ( hopefully ) canonical reference for each item. Indexes are built at Nevada, and the indexed dataset is distributed to server sites.
2. Server module. Servers run on unix computers and answer to gopher-type-7 requests. Boolean keyword logic is implemented. See file "how-to-compose-veronica-queries". Several options allow retrieval of items with specified gopher-types, retrieval of a file of links containing the search results, and override for the default limit on number of results returned, which is 200 items.
Server software runs on most flavors of unix, requires dbm and perl, and requires about 1.4 GB of data on disk, with considerable /tmp space available.
Server software is available to any site which wants to run a server. Server sites are encouraged to offer the service to the net at large.
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Approximate number of such servers in use: twelve.
Auxiliary tool: Maltshop v. 0.2d Maltshop builds a menu of Public Gopher Servers for the local gopher menu.
Maltshop software available from:
Via ftp: veronica.scs.unr.edu veronica-code/ menu-builder-0.2d
Via Gopher: veronica.scs.unr.edu, port 70 11/Search ALL of Gopherspace 12/Script to automate your local Veronica menu
General comments:
Basic veronica service has been fairly stable since July 1993. Indexing is quite efficient, and most queries are resolved in ten seconds or quicker. More than 1,000,000 queries were resolved in February, 1994.
Though veronica is well-accepted at this level of service, we are undertaking significant upgrade efforts during Winter 93-94.
Site name: UCCSN veronica server Access details: gopher to veronica.scs.unr.edu, port 70. Open "veronica" folder; choose one of the search types available.
Site name: University of Minnesota Gopher server Access details: gopher to gopher.tc.umn.edu, port 70. Other Gopher and Information Servers Search Gopherspace with veronica. choose one of the search types available.
Site name: NYSERNET veronica server Access details: gopher to nysernet.org, port 70. Open "Search the Internet" folder; choose one of veronica searches.
Site name: SERRA veronica server Access details: gopher to gopher.unipi.it, port 70. Open "University of Pisa - Services" folder; choose the veronica search.
Document Title: veronica FAQ: Common Questions and answers about veronica, a title search and retrieval system for use with the internet gopher.
Location details: Via Gopher: Site: veronica.scs.unr.edu, port 70. veronica veronica FAQ Full file name: veronica-faq
Site: gopher.micro.umn.edu, port 70. Other Gopher and Information services Search Gopherspace with veronica veronica FAQ Full file name: veronica-faq
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Site: gopher.cnidr.org, port 70. veronica veronica FAQ Full file name: veronica-faq
Via anonymous ftp: Site: veronica.scs.unr.edu veronica-docs/veronica-faq
Document Title: How to Compose veronica Search Queries.
Location details: Via Gopher: Site: veronica.scs.unr.edu, port 70. veronica How to Compose veronica Search Queries. Full file name: how-to-query-veronica
Site: gopher.cnidr.org, port 70. veronica How to Compose veronica Search Queries. Full file name: how-to-query-veronica
Via anonymous ftp: Site: veronica.scs.unr.edu veronica-docs/how-to-query-veronica
Document Title: About veronica.
Location details: Via Gopher: Site: veronica.scs.unr.edu, port 70. veronica About veronica Full file name: veronica-about
Site: gopher.micro.umn.edu, port 70. Other Gopher and Information services Search Gopherspace with veronica About veronica Full file name: veronica-about
Site: gopher.cnidr.org, port 70. veronica About veronica Full file name: veronica-about
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WAIS - The Wide Area Information Servers system - is an electronic publishing software set which allows you to search out and retrieve multimedia information from databases anywhere in the world. WAIS databases may be accessed by WAIS, gopher, and WWW clients (such as Mosaic), and via online services such as Delphi and America OnLine. WAIS software includes user interfaces for most platforms, and server software that provides automatic indexing of databases.
WAIS was developed by Thinking Machines Corporation of Cambridge, Massachusetts in collaboration with Apple Computer, Inc., Dow Jones & Company, and KPMG Peat Marwick. With over 100 databases and 5,000 users worldwide, WAIS is rapidly becoming a standard for information distribution within the Internet environment.
WAIS is a client-server application. Most of the clients remain freely available with a few exceptions. WAIS, Inc. develops and sells commercial versions of WAIS and the Clearinghouse for Networked Information Discovery and Retrieval (CNIDR) develops freeWAIS, a version free for distribution and use. A few freely distributable versions remain available from Thinking Machines, Inc. and other organizations.
What does WAIS do?
WAIS allows multimedia information to be stored anywhere on any platform. Using your interface of choice, WAIS enables you to find personal, corporate and public information. The information is accessible regardless of format: text, formatted documents, pictures, spreadsheets, graphics, sound, or video.
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WAIS recognizes natural language queries. The search and retrieval of relevant information is made using your native language. To date, we have used English, French, Italian, and Latin! The most relevant documents, regardless of size, can be sent back to the server in their entirety to further refine your search (telling the server, "Find me more like this document.") Proven searches can be automatically repeated, monitoring and alerting you to new information as it becomes available.
How does WAIS work?
WAIS uses a single computer-to-computer protocol (NISO Z39.50- 1988). Each WAIS server reads your question and based on its words, searches the full text of the database for the most relevant documents, and ranks them using automatic word weighting. Servers need not fully understand your query; the retrieval process is based on a search method called relevance feedback.
NISO: Z39.50 Implementor's Group (ZIG) IETF: IIIR (Integrating Internet Information Resources) Working Group URI (Uniform Resource Identifiers) Working Group
RFC 1689 Networked Information Retrieval: Tools and Groups August 1994
Date completed or updated: 13th December, 1993 By: Name: Jane Smith Email address: Jane.Smith@CNIDR.org
Platform: Most Unix variations
Primary Contact: Name: George Brett Email address: George.Brett@CNIDR.org Telephone: +1-919-248-1499
Server software available from: ftp://pub/NIDR.tools/freewais @ftp.cnidr.org gopher://gopher.cnidr.org http://cnidr.org
Location of more information: info@CNIDR.org
Latest version number: freeWAIS 0.202
Brief Scope and Characteristics: server and client code for freeWAIS.
Approximate number of such servers in use: Unknown. ~568 databases are registered and freely accessible.
General comments: Source code freely available for use and modification. Internet community contributes to the software development, CNIDR incorporates these developments into the freeWAIS releases.
Date completed or updated: 13th December, 1993 By: Name: Brewster Kahle Email address: brewster@wais.com
Platform: NeXT
Primary Contact: Name: Paul Burchard Email address: burchard@math.utah.edu Telephone:
Client software available from: /pub/freeware/next@wais.com via anonymous FTP
Location of more information:
Latest version number: WAIStation-NeXT-1.9.6
Brief Scope and Characteristics:
General comments: NeXT client and server
Future plans:
------------------
Date completed or updated: 13th December, 1993 By: Name: Brewster Kahle
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Email address: brewster@wais.com
Platform: EIWAIS 1.55
Primary Contact: Name: Kevin Gourley Email address: pc-shareware@einet.net Telephone:
Client software available from: /pub/freeware/windows@wais.com via anonymous FTP /einet/pc@ftp.einet.net via anonymous FTP
Location of more information:
Latest version number: Version 1.55
Brief Scope and Characteristics: WAIS client for Windows and Windows Sockets
General comments: Windows WAIS Client for Windows Sockets - supporting multiple source queries - advanced program/viewer launching - embedded (any file size) text viewer - auto-keyword highlighting - graphics viewers included - auto-browse mode for redirected source queries - auto-parsing of WAIS catalogs returned by servers - runs on wide range of winsock TCP/IP stacks
Future plans:
--------------------------
Date completed or updated: 13th December, 1993 By: Name: Brewster Kahle Email address: Brewster@wais.com
Platform: telnet access (vt100)
Primary Contact: Name: John Curran Email address: jcurran@nnsc.nsf.net Telephone:
Client software available from: /pub/freeware/unix-src/wais-8-b5.1-swais-patches @wais.com
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Location of more information: telnet to quake.think.com log in as wais.
Latest version number:
Brief Scope and Characteristics:
General comments:
Future plans:
------------------
Date completed or updated: 13th December, 1993 By: Name: Brewster Kahle Email address: brewster@wais.com
Platform: MacWAIS 1.28
Primary Contact: Name: John Hardin Email address: mac-shareware@einet.net Telephone:
Client software available from: /pub/freeware/mac@wais.com via anonymous FTP
Location of more information:
Latest version number: 1.28
Brief Scope and Characteristics:
General comments:
Future plans:
------------------
Date completed or updated: 13th December, 1993 By: Name: Brewster Kahle Email address: Brewster@wais.com
RFC 1689 Networked Information Retrieval: Tools and Groups August 1994
Telephone:
Client software available from: /pub/freeware/mac/HyperWais* @wais.com
Location of more information: contact author
Latest version number: 1.9
Brief Scope and Characteristics: HyperWais is a hypercard implementation of a WAIS client. Its main characteristic is that it allows the user to remodel the interface completely to their liking.
General comments: Requires approximately 1.7Mb to run (including Hypercard). Requires system 7.0 or greater. Requires Hypercard 2.1 Requires Mac TCP
Future plans: None at present
------------------
Date completed or updated: 13th December, 1993 By: Name: Brewster Kahle Email address: Brewster@wais.com
Platform: VMS
Primary Contact: Name: Jim Fullton Email address: Jim.Fullton@cnidr.org Telephone:
Client software available from:
Location of more information:
Latest version number:
Brief Scope and Characteristics:
General comments:
Future plans:
------------------
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Date completed or updated: 13th December, 1993 By: Name: Brewster Kahle Email address: Brewster@wais.com
Platform: DOS
Primary Contact: Name: Jim Fullton Email address: Jim.Fullton@cnidr.org Telephone:
Client software available from: /pub/freeware/dos/pc.wais @wais.com
Location of more information:
Latest version number:
Brief Scope and Characteristics:
General comments:
Future plans:
------------------
Date completed or updated: 13th December, 1993 By: Name: Brewster Kahle Email address: Brewster@wais.com
Platform: DOS (Clarkson packet driver and Erick Englke's WATT/TCP)
Primary Contact: Name: Faeiz Hindi Email address: hindi@eniac.seas.upenn.edu Telephone:
Client software available from: /pub/tcpip/pcwais.zip@hilbert.wharton.upenn.edu
Location of more information:
Latest version number:
Brief Scope and Characteristics:
General comments:
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Future plans:
------------------
Date completed or updated: 13th December, 1993 By: Name: Brewster Kahle Email address: Brewster@wais.com
Platform: AVS
Primary Contact: Name: Steve Thorpe Email address: thorpe@ncsc.org Telephone:
Client software available from: avs_modules/data_input/awais/* @avs.ncsc.org
Location of more information:
Latest version number:
Brief Scope and Characteristics:
General comments:
Future plans:
------------------
Date completed or updated: 13th December, 1993 By: Name: Brewster Kahle Email address: Brewster@wais.com
Platform: RS6000
Primary Contact: Name: Dennis Shiao Email address: shiao@ans.net Telephone:
Client software available from: /pub/freeware/rs6000/wais-8-b3-dist.tar.Z@wais.com
Location of more information:
Latest version number:
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Brief Scope and Characteristics:
General comments: client and server
"The details are correct, but I must point out that this version of WAIS is most outdated. I'd suggest replacing it with AIX ports of the wais-8-b5 or freeWAIS packages, if anyone's done those (I haven't) .." -Dennis.
- "WAIS Server, WAIS Workstation, and WAIS Forwarder for UNIX Technical Description", Release 1.1, December, 1993.
Available via anonymous ftp: /pub/wais-inc-doc/msWord/Tech-description -1.1.sit.hqx @ftp.wais.com
- "Interfaces for Distributed Systems of Information Servers", Brewster Kahle, Harry Morris, Jonathan Goldman (Thinking Machines Corporation), Thomas Erickson (Apple Computer), John Curran (NSF Network Service Center), March, 1992. (formally named "Interfaces for Wide Area Information Servers")
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Available via anonymous ftp: /pub/wais-inc-doc/txt/Interfaces.txt@ftp.wais.com or WAIS server wais-discussion-archives.src
o instructions to information providers
See the documentation in the release: /pub/freeware/unix-src/wais-8-b5.1.tar.z@wais.com or the wais-docs.src WAIS server.
o user manuals
The Mac interface WAIStation has a user manual. The unix commands have man pages.
o training materials - tutorials - canned demos
- Macintosh demostration screen-movie: Steve Cisler of Apple put together a short screen-recorder movie for seeing some of what WAIStation does. Available via anonymous FTP: /pub/wais-doc/WAIStation-Canned-Demo.sit.hqx@wais.com - sample session (screen dumps) - "WAIStation, A User Interface for WAIS", February 1991, Thinking Machines technical report TMC-203. User interface documentation with screen shots.
- videos
Available in special circumstances. Contact info@wais.com.
As currently defined, NICNAME/WHOIS services is a TCP transaction based query/response server, running on a few specific central machines, that provides netwide directory service to internet users. Since the WHOIS service was defined in 1985, it has evolved into a distributed service.
The InterNIC Registration Services is located at Network Solutions, Inc., Herndon, VA, and is funded by a cooperative agreement from the National Science Foundations to provide assistance in registering networks, domains, asn's, and other entities to the Internet community via telephone, electronic mail, and U.S. postal mail.
Databases and information servers of interest to network users are provided, including the WHOIS registry of domains, networks, asn's and their associated poc's. Gopher and Wais interfaces are also available for retrieving information and accessing whois. Online documents maintained at registration services include registration related rfc's, registration templates, and various netinfo files. Many of the online files are available through our automatic mail service, MAILSERV@RS.INTERNIC.NET. Whois queries can also be directed to rs.internic.net. From a host, use the TELNET program to connect to host RS.INTERNIC.NET. When greeted by the Registration host, type "WHOIS" and press RETURN.
MAILSERV@RS.INTERNIC.NET is an automated service provided by InterNIC Registration Services. It allows access to documents and information via ordinary electronic mail. This is especially useful for users who do not have access to the NIC via a direct Internet link, such as users of BITNET, CSNET and UUCP sites.
To use the mail service, send a mail message to MAILSERV@RS.INTERNIC.NET. In the SUBJECT field, request the type of service you wish followed by any needed arguments. The message body is normally ignored. Large files will be broken into smaller separate messages. The information you request will be sent back to you as soon as possible.
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WHOIS xxx Returns information about xxx from the WHOIS service. Use "WHOIS HELP" for information on how to use WHOIS.
The MILNET Network Information Center, maintains the central NICNAME database and server, providing online look-up of individuals, network organizations, MILNET nodes, and other information of interest to those involved in management of the Internet. Whois queries can be sent to nic.ddn.mil.
Description: This mailing list is used by the IETF Whois and Network Information Lookup Service (WNILS) working group which is defining enhancements to whois.
Clients are available from the source listed for server software. VMS clients are available from TVG/Multinet Most TCP/IP networking packages for personal computers include a whois client.
Internet Drafts: draft-ietf-wnils-whois-01.txt draft-ietf-wnils-whois-02.txt draft-ietf-wnils-whois-lookup-00.txt draft-huitema-solo-00.txt
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Please check the 1id-abstracts.txt listing contained in the internet-drafts Shadow Directories on nic.ddn.mil, nnsc.nsf.net, nic.nordu.net, ftp.isi.edu, or munnari.oz.au to learn the current status of any Internet Draft.
The WWW project merges the techniques of networked information and hypertext to make an easy but powerful global information system. W3 uses the concept of a seamless information space (the "web"), in which all objects including those accessed by earlier protocols (wais, gopher, ftp, etc.) exist.
The project allows information sharing within internationally dispersed teams, and the dissemination of information by support groups. Originally aimed at the High Energy Physics community, it has spread to other areas and attracted much interest in user support, resource discovery and collaborative work areas. It is currently the most advanced information system deployed on the Internet.
READER VIEW
The WWW world consists of documents, and links. Indexes are special documents which, rather than being read, may be searched. The result of such a search is another ("virtual") document containing links to the documents found. A simple protocol (" HTTP ") is used to allow a browser program to request a keyword search by a remote information server.
The web contains documents in many formats. Those documents which are hypertext, (real or virtual) contain links to other documents, or places within documents. All documents, whether real, virtual or indexes, look similar to the reader and are contained within the same addressing scheme.
To follow a link, a reader clicks with a mouse (or types in a number if he or she has no mouse). To search and index, a reader gives keywords (or other search criteria). These are the only operations necessary to access the entire world of data.
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INFORMATION PROVIDER VIEW
The WWW browsers can access many existing data systems via existing protocols (FTP, NNTP) or via HTTP and a gateway. In this way, the critical mass of data is quickly exceeded, and the increasing use of the system by readers and information suppliers encourage each other.
Providing information is as simple as running the W3 server and pointing it at an existing directory structure. The server automatically generates the hypertext view of your files to guide the user around.
To personalize it, you can write a few SGML hypertext files to give an even more friendly view. Also, any file available by anonymous FTP, or any internet newsgroup can be immediately linked into the web. The very small start-up effort is designed to allow small contributions. At the other end of the scale, large information providers may provide an HTTP server with full text or keyword indexing. This may allow access to a large existing database without changing the way that database is managed. Such gateways have already been made into Oracle(tm), WAIS, and Digital's VMS/Help systems, to name but a few.
The WWW model gets over the frustrating incompatibilities of data format between suppliers and reader by allowing negotiation of format between a smart browser and a smart server. This should provide a basis for extension into multimedia, and allow those who share application standards to make full use of them across the web.
This summary does not describe the many exciting possibilities opened up by the WWW project, such as efficient document caching. The reduction of redundant out-of-date copies, and the use of knowledge daemons. There is more information in the online project documentation, including some background on hypertext and many technical notes.
GETTING STARTED
You can bootstrap yourself into the web by telnetting to info.cern.ch (no user or password). You can try a full screen interface "Lynx" by telnetting to ukanaix.cc.ukans.edu, login in as "www". You can also find out more about WWW in this way. These are the least sophisticated browsers -- remember that the window-oriented ones are much smarter! It is much more efficient to install a browser on your own machine, and you have many more facilities.
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If you have an X-windows based workstation, PC or Mac just FTP to FTP.NCSA.UIUC.EDU and get the binary of NCSA's "Mosaic" browser in directory /Web/Mosaic-binaries. Download it, uncompress it, set it executable, and run it. It will tell you all you need to know.
Mosaic is now available for PCs and Apple Macs.
If you have an MSDOS machine with Windows, you could try the "Cello" browser from FATTY.LAW.CORNELL.EDU in directory /pub/LII/Cello.
The line mode browser is currently available in source form by anonymous FTP from node info.cern.ch [currently 128.141.201.74] if you take both files
Also available is a hypertext editor for the NeXT (in /pub/www/bin/next), the MidasWWW and ViolaWWW browsers for X11, an alpha-test Mac browser, and and a basic server (/pub/www/src/WWWDaemon_v.vv.tar.Z). Documentation, including the latest list of software available , is readable using www. A plain text version of the installation instructions is included in the tar file!
Printable (postscript) documentation and articles are in /pub/www/doc on info.cern.ch.
Sponsoring Organisations / Funding source: NO FUNDING SOURCE
Bodies providing development effort include HEP labs (CERN, CH; SLAC, CA, USA; FNAL, IL, USA; NIKHEF, NL; etc.), National Center for SuperComputer Applications (NCSA, IL, USA), O'Reilly Associates, (ORA, CA, USA), Clearinghouse for Networked Information Discovery and Retrieval (CNIDR, NC, USA), BSD Inc (BSD, CA, USA) and many others too numerous to mention.
What is supported: HTTP FTP anonymous FTP Gopher NNTP WAIS (compile time option) Local mounted file access Telnet sessions Rlogin sessions
What it runs over: TCP/IP DECnet option.
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Other NIR servers W3 clients interworks with: Techinfo, Hyper-G and X.500 via gateways. Built-in capability in clients for others above Archie access via WWW "WARCHIE" archie server with direct hypertext pointers to FTP sites.
Resource indexing: Many browsable and searchable indexes of available information, by subject (virtual libraries), and by position (geographical list of servers). Many of these point to any form of data, HTTP or other server. A list of such indexes is at http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/DataSources/ bySubject/Virtual_libraries/Overview.html
Future plans: Collaborative work features, Hypertext editors for information organisation
* Fast stateless file server runs over TCP/IP. * Suitable for rapid documentation navigation. * Multimedia server allows multiple file formats to be used. * File format selected for transmission based on client capabilities. * Add special functions using scripts. Standard CGI interface. * Logging
Approximate number of such servers in use: 600
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General comments:
Some servers serve many databases.
Many tools available for serving different sorts of information
Gnu info teX SGML man pages
etc., as hypertext.
--------------------------------
Other servers: For more information use WWW to access http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/Daemon/Overview.html
Servers include:
NCSA server Similar feature set to CERN's httpd, support from NCSA.
Plexus Written in Perl -- many features. Unix.
MacHTTPD Server for the Macintosh
REXX for VM A server consisting of a small C program which passes control to a server written in REXX.
NOTE: A full list of client software is kept in http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/Clients.html and is not repeated here, as the list is constantly changing. Around 20 different clients. Telnet to info.cern.ch to see the list. Only the Line Mode Browser, lynx and Mosaic are covered here.
Date completed or updated: 28th January, 1994 By: Name: Tim Berners-Lee Email address: timbl@info.cern.ch
Platform: Anything. Even a hard copy terminal. Written in portable C.
Primary Contact: Name: Tim Berners-Lee Email address: timbl@info.cern.ch
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Client software available from: ftp://info.cern.ch/pub/www/src
Location of more information: http://info.cern.ch./hypertext/WWW/LineMode/Browser.html and linked documents
Latest version number: 2.14
Brief Scope and Characteristics:
The LineMode Browser is suitable for use on dumb terminals, requiring no control sequences except for carriage return and line feed. It is also of course useable from terminal emulators in workstation windows. It can also be used as a text formatter, as part of a mail server, and as a general information retrieval tool.
History list, Back/Next/Previous/Home navigation, ability to print or save documents (or pipe to shell commands on unix).
General comments:
Very stable product which has many uses apart from interactive use. Generates C .h files from hypertext marked files, etc. Source release requires W3 library product. Public Domain.
Future plans:
Future enhancements to include tracing of many links.
Demonstration sites:
telnet info.cern.ch or telnet 128.141.201.74 (SWITZERLAND) telnet vms.huji.ac.il or telnet 128.139.4.3 (www) (ISRAEL)
-----------------------------------
Client: Lynx
Date completed or updated: 11 February 1994 By: Name: Lou Montulli Email address: montulli@ukanaix.cc.ukans.edu
Platform: Unix + VMS
Primary Contact(s): Name: Lou Montulli, Michael Grobe
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Email address: montulli@ukanaix.cc.ukans.edu, grobe@ukanaix.cc.ukans.edu Postal Address: Computer Center, University of Kansas, Lawrence KS, 66045 Telephone: +1-913-864-0436 (Lou) +1-913-864-0452 (Michael) Fax: +1-913-864-0485
Client software available from: ftp2.cc.ukans.edu in directory /pub/lynx.
Location of more information: ftp2.cc.ukans.edu
Latest version number: 2.2
Brief Scope and Characteristics:
Lynx clients provide a user-friendly hypertext interface to all of the major internet protocols for character cell (vt100) terminal users on UNIX and VMS platforms. Lynx natively understands Gopher, HTTP, WAIS, FTP, NNTP (USENET NEWS) and CSO protocols and can transparently retrieve information using any of them. Lynx can also launch telnet and tn3270 sessions and has support to run executable programs on the local machine so that it can be used as a menuing system. Lynx is a part of the World Wide Web (WWW) project and has all of the features of a WWW client including HTML support and HTML+ forms support. Additional resource types such as Archie Techinfo, X.500, and Hytelnet may be also accessed through HTTP and Gopher gateway functions.
Future plans:
Development of a DOS (non windows) version.
Help Line:
Name: Lou Montulli Email address: montulli@ukanaix.cc.ukans.edu Telephone: +1-913-864-0436 Level of support offered: volunteer Hours available: 11-5pm M-F CST
Demonstration sites:
Site name: ukanaix.cc.ukans.edu Access details: telnet ukanaix.cc.ukanse.du login as "www"
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Documentation:
o current overview http://www.cc.ukans.edu/about_lynx/about_lynx/about_lynx.html o user manuals http://www.cc.ukans.edu/lynx_help/lynx_help_main.html o miscellaneous documents tar file of all documentation: ftp://ftp2.cc.ukans.edu/pub/lynx/lynx_help_files.tar.Z
Date completed or updated: 16th December, 1993 By: Name: Marc Andreessen Email address: marca@ncsa.uiuc.edu
Platform: X Window System (Unix) -- Sun, DEC, IBM, SGI, HP, others.
Primary Contact: Name: Marc Andreessen Email address: marca@ncsa.uiuc.edu Postal Address: National Center for Supercomputing Applications 605 E. Springfield Champaign, IL 61820 Telephone: +1-217-244-0765
Client software available from: ftp.ncsa.uiuc.edu in /Web/Mosaic.
Location of more information: ftp.ncsa.uiuc.edu in /Web/mosaic, and online, within Mosaic. http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/SDG/Software/Mosaic/Docs/help-about.html
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o Frequently Asked Questions http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/SDG/Software/Mosaic/Docs/mosaic-faq.html o user manuals http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/SDG/Software/Mosaic/Docs/mosaic-docs.html
Latest version number: 1.1
Brief Scope and Characteristics:
NCSA Mosaic for the X Window System is a client interface to a wide variety of networked information systems, including World Wide Web, Gopher, WAIS, FTP, Usenet News, Archie, Techinfo, X.500, Hytelnet, Telnet, NCSA Data Management Facility, CSO ph/qi and others. It offers a Motif-based point-and-click X interface with support for plaintext, formatted text, and embedded images; hyperlinks can also refer to images, video sequences, audio clips, PostScript files, etc.
Mosaic also offers substantial interaction and collaboration facilities, including global history tracking, text and voice annotations, group/community-wide annotations, and more.
General comments:
Sponsoring Organisation: National Center for Supercomputing Applications
Future plans:
Enhancement of the NCSA Mosaic environment to support advanced networked information systems and collaboration capabilities; development of clients on other architectures; research and development into intelligent agent-style user assistance mechanisms and novel navigation and representation strategies for dense, dynamic distributed information spaces. (This is all dependent upon funding, of course.) Beta-test versions of Mac and Microsoft Windows 3.1 were released in the fall of 1993.
RFC 1689 Networked Information Retrieval: Tools and Groups August 1994
Documentation:
All the W3 documentation available is in the web. Some is also dumped off into postscript. Here are the URLs of entry points into the web for the subjects requested:
** To retrieve any document by URL, use WWW (www <url> for example) or ** send mail containing the command "send " followed by the URL to ** listserv@info.cern.ch
RFC 1689 Networked Information Retrieval: Tools and Groups August 1994
[General WWW bibliography]
Bibliography:
o For latest list, see: http://info.cern.ch./hypertext/WWW/Bibliography.html
Bibliography for the World Wide Web
WORLD-WIDE WEB BIBLIOGRAPHY
This lists papers and articles about the W3 initiative and related matters which you may want to pick up for background reading or quote as references. You can of course also quote any page you read with W3 by its document address. The FTP server info.cern.ch has some of these in /pub/www/doc.
X.500 is an international standard designed to provide a distributed global directory service. It is primarily used today to provide 'White Pages' services, although other types of services which have directory components (automated mail aliasing, for example) are beginning to be run over X.500. In addition to information about people and organizations, the Directory also contains a pilot K-12 Directory, pilot Information Resource information, and some other non-White Pages information. X.500 contains a number of security features, which are implemented on different paradigms in the various servers.
User's View:
Users (either human or electronic) run a client program to connect to a local X.500 server. Since X.500 is distributed, it appears that the entire global X.500 directory is available from the local server. From this server connection, the user can add, delete, or modify information held by the Directory, or issue powerful search commands to locate individuals or other information.
The first solid version of the X.500 protocol was released in 1988, and has been the subject of much research in the past 5 years. Consequently, there are a large number of clients, for almost every platform, and a healthy number of servers. There are mail interfaces to some parts of the X.500 directory, and there is a X.500 to Gopher gateway. An X.500 interface to archie is currently under development, as well as an X.500 to WWW interface.
Information Provider's View:
X.500 provides a set of mechanisms to allow distributed location of, maintenance of, and access to a large set of data. However, current servers force a hierarchical view on the location of the data, so it may not be suitable for all applications. Also, the X.500 directory is today unable to provide access to information at a rate which would allow 'real-time' applications (such as
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keeping routing information in the directory).
Also, there is a great effort underway to reduce the startup costs of X.500 access by providing a lightweight X.500 access protocol for client-server applications. This work is detailed in RFC 1487:
"Lightweight Directory Access Protocol", by Yeong, Howes, and Kille. This protocol is expected to make the cost of entry for a service provider much less that it has been.
Information Types Supported:
X.500 allows information to be served in an attribute:value paradigm, with related attributes grouped into 'objects'. Each entry in the directory can be described by multiple objects. Attributes can have values which are text strings, dereferenceable file names, or text-encoded photographs, and experimentation is underway to keep digitally encoded sounds in the directory.
X.500 encompasses a great number of clients and as a distributed system does not have a central help line. Please see the Documentation section for pointers to servers, clients, and associated help lines.
A full list of servers and clients is available in FYI 11, RFC 1292, "A guide to available X.500 Implementations". See the Documentation section for the location of this document. However, the most widely deployed server is listed here for convenience.
QUIPU
Date completed or updated: 21 October, 1993 By: Name: Chris Weider E-Mail: clw@bunyip.com
Document Title: FYI 11, RFC 1292, "Catalog of Available X.500 Implementations", R. Lang, R. Wright. Location details: Available for anonymous FTP from Site: ds.internic.net Full file name: RFC-1292.txt
An update of this document is in preparation: Document Title: "A Revised Catalog of Available X.500 Implementations", A. Getchell, S. Sataluri. Location details: Available for anonymous FTP from Site: ds.internic.net Full file name: draft-ietf-ids-catalog-00.txt
Document Title: FYI 13, RFC 1308, "Executive Introduction to directory services using the X.500 protocol", C. Weider, J. K. Reynolds Location details: Available for anonymous FTP from Site: ds.internic.net Full file name: RFC-1308.txt
Document Title: FYI 14, RFC 1309, "Technical Overview of Directory Services using the X.500 protocol", C. Weider, J. K. Reynolds, S. Heker. Location details: Available for anonymous FTP from Site: ds.internic.net Full file name: RFC-1309.txt
Document Title: RFC 1430, "A Strategic Plan for Deploying an Internet X.500 Directory Service", S. Kille, E. Huizer, V. Cerf, R. Hobby, S. Kent. Location details: Available for anonymous FTP from Site: ds.internic.net Full file name: RFC-1430.txt
Document Title: FYI 21, RFC 1491, "A Survey of Advanced Usages of X.500", C. Weider, R. Wright. Location details: Available for anonymous FTP from Site: ds.internic.net Full file name: RFC-1491.txt
Document Title: RFC 1487, "Lightweight Directory Access Protocol", W. Yeong, T. Howes, and S. Hardcastle-Kille
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Location details: Available for anonymous FTP from Site: ds.internic.net Full file name: RFC-1487.txt
Document Title: RFC 1588, "WHITE PAGES MEETING REPORT", J. Postel, C. Anderson Location details: Available for anonymous FTP from Site: ds.internic.net Full file name: RFC-1588.txt
These documents contain pointers to the rest of the literature.
RFC 1689 Networked Information Retrieval: Tools and Groups August 1994
7. NIR Groups
This section contains information about the various groups working in the area of networked information retrieval. The groups are listed alphabetically within their overall groupings (CNI, IETF, RARE, etc.). See Section 3.
NIR Group Name: Coalition for Networked Information (CNI)
Sponsoring Organisation: Association of Research Libraries (ARL), CAUSE, and EDUCOM
Working subgroups:
Name of subgroup: Modernization of Scholarly Publishing Transformation of Scholarly Communication Directories and Information Resource Services Architecture and Standards Legislation, Codes, Policies and Practices Access to Public Information Teaching and Learning Management and Professional and User Education
Mailinglist-Address: cni-announce@cni.org
Description of main group:
The Coalition for Networked Information was founded in March 1990 to help realize the promise of high performance networks and computers for the advancement of scholarship and the enrichment of intellectual productivity. The Coalition is a partnership of the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), CAUSE, and EDUCOM. ARL is dedicated to equitable access to, and effective use of, recorded knowlege in support of teaching, research, scholarship, and community service, and CAUSE and EDUCOM are dedicated to different aspects of the introduction, use, and management of information technology and related resources in research and education in general and higher education in particular. The Coalition pursues its mission with the
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assistance of a task force that provides a common vehicle by which more than 190 institutions and organizations are exploring a shared vision of how information management must change in the 1990s to meet the social and economic opportunities and challenges of the 21st century. Members of the Coalition Task Force include, among others, higher education institutions, publishers, network service providers, computer hardware, software, and systems companies, library networks and organizations, and public and state libraries. A truly diverse collaboration of institutions and organizations.
None. The Coalition relies on the publication programs of its parent organizations (ARL, CAUSE, and EDUCOM) to disseminate printed information on the Coalition's projects and programs. Information on the Coalition's program is also disseminated via electronic mailing lists on the network.
NIR Group Name: Architecture and Standards Working Group
Sponsoring Organisation: Coalition for Networked Information (CNI)
Working subgroups Name of subgroup: Z39.50 Interoperability Testbed Mailinglist-Address:
Description of main group:
Program priorities are 1) to facilitate a consistent and complete mechanism for linking bibliographic, abstracting, and indexing files to files of their associated source materials; 2) a single standard for the transmission of bitmapped image files; 3) protocols for handling networked requests for delivery of source materials; 4) mechanisms for interorganizational authentication, accounting, and billing; and 5) to integrate lessons drawn from the experience of pilot projects that exercise networked printing utilities and 6) to provide an "interoperability workshop" to specify, implement, and test advanced functions of Z39.50 to accelerate the pace and to ensure the quality of standardization efforts in this area.
NIR Group Name: Directories and Information Resource Services Working Group
Sponsoring Organisation: Coalition for Networked Information (CNI)
Working subgroups: Name of subgroup: TopNode Management Team
Mailinglist-Address: cni-directories@cni.org
Description of main group:
This group recognizes the need for open systems, standards, and therefore, interoperable products and services based upon a distributed architecture of servers that draw upon a common or at least comparable set of data elements. It is creating a (printed and networked) directory of directories and resource information services that provide qualitative (consumer) as well as descriptive information. The group supports the Library of Congress effort to enhance the MARC formats to account for the cataloging requirements of networked resources and services, and the National Science Foundation effort to procure a new NSFNet Network Information Center.
Postal Address: Clearinghouse for Networked Information Discovery and Retrieval Center for Communications at MCNC PO Box 12889, 3021 Cornwallis Road Research Triangle Park, NC 27709-2889 USA
Telephone: +1-919-248-1499
Fax: +1-919-248-1101
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---------------------
Name: Peggy Seiden
Email address: pseiden@skidmore.edu
Postal Address: Scribner Library Skidmore College North Broadway Saratoga Springs, NY 12866
NIR Group Name: TopNode for Networked Information Resources, Services, and Tools
Sponsoring Organisation: Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) Directories and Information Resource Services Working Group
Working subgroups: Name of subgroup: Mailinglist-Address:
Description of main group:
(from ARL Newsletter #164 -- September 9, 1992)
The Coalition's TopNode Project is creating a directory of directories, catalogs and aids of networked information resources, services and tools. The project is intended to facilitate the network navigational duties, responsibilities and tasks of staff in libraries, computer centers, networking offices and other similar operations. The primary product of the TopNode project will be a set of records describing these networked information resources, records that can be loaded into a wide range of database management systems.
Based on their response to a Call for Statements of Interest and Experience, Indiana University and Merit Network, Inc. were chosen to lead the development effort on the Coalition TopNode project. Pete Percival, Manager, Academic Information Environment at Indiana University and Craig Summerhill, Coalition Systems Coordinator, have completed the design for the database structure which is being built on the Coalition's Internet fileserver using BRS/SEARCH. Based on earlier work of the leaders of the Directories and Resource Information Services Working Group, George Brett II of the University of North Carolina General Administration and Peggy Seiden of Skidmore College Library, Percival and Summerhill have developed a data structure that they believe to be both flexible and responsive to the needs of the many interested parties who have been consulted.
Under the direction of Gary Charbonneau of the Indiana University Libraries, records are being created and prepared for loading. A
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thesaurus of added descriptor terms is being maintained. As of mid-August 1992, close to 200 records had been verified and had received descriptive cataloging.
When the database is complete, libraries will be alerted and encouraged to mount the TopNode records into their online catalogs. Records will be available from the Coalition. In addition, MERIT will use the TopNode database in an experiment to test the viability of the X.500 directory format standard for providing yellow pages-type services (e.g., with subject access). After its initial release, the database will be maintained by Indiana University libraries on the Coalition server; BRS has assisted in the development of procedures for online data entry.
The Coalition has an alpha implementation of Topnode setup using the BRS/SEARCH full text information retrieval software. This database was created during the data element definition portion of the project, so the data may not be of production-level service quality.
NIR Group Name: Clearinghouse for Networked Information Discovery and Retrieval
Sponsoring Organisation: National Science Foundation, Center for Communications at MCNC
Working subgroups: Name of subgroup: Mailinglist-Address:
Description of main group:
Several user-friendly client-server software tools have been developed recently for locating and retrieving information published on computer platforms reachable over wide-area data communications networks like the Internet. Among them, freeWAIS (freely available wide-area information system), the Internet Gopher, archie, and the WorldWide Web (WWW) have become popular. freeWAIS, archie, and Gopher indicate where information of interest is likely to reside and then assist the user in locating specific information. WWW permits a user to thread a path through the network by selecting tagged hypertext items.
While focused on the evolution of wide-area information retrieval systems, the Clearinghouse for Networked Information Discovery and Retrieval (CNIDR) works closely with developers of other tools toward providing compatibility, consistency, and, to the extent possible, convergence of the tools.
Specific activities are to provide a central focus and forum for networked information discovery and retrieval (NIDR) tools and to minimize the divergence of individual implementations by providing a repository for the collection, evaluation, and distribution of protocol-compliant releases and enhanced versions.
CNIDR participates in standards and policy associations such as the Internet Engineering Task Force and the Coalition for Networked Information, with the goal of increasing consensus among developers and exploring appropriate uses of networked
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information. CNIDR also actively promotes the use of networked information discovery and retrieval tools at many national and international conferences to inform and educate implementors and end users.
Clearinghouse for Networked Information Discovery and Retrieval (CNIDR) Center for Communications at MCNC PO Box 12889, 3021 Cornwallis Road Research Triangle Park, NC 27709-2889 USA
Telephone: +1-919-248-1886
Fax: +1-919-248-1101
------------------
Name: Jane Smith
Email address: Jane.Smith@cnidr.org
Postal Address:
Clearinghouse for Networked Information Discovery and Retrieval (CNIDR) Center for Communications at MCNC PO Box 12889, 3021 Cornwallis Road Research Triangle Park, NC 27709-2889 USA
Telephone: +1-919-248-9213
Fax: +1-919-248-1101
------------------
Name: Jim Fullton
Email address: Jim.Fullton@cnidr.org
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Postal Address:
Clearinghouse for Networked Information Discovery and Retrieval (CNIDR) Center for Communications at MCNC PO Box 12889, 3021 Cornwallis Road Research Triangle Park, NC 27709-2889 USA
Description: e-mail sent to this address will receive an automated response containing more information about current CNIDR activities.
Archive: none
-------------------------------
Mailing Lists: zip@cnidr.org
Address: zip@cnidr.org
Administration: zip-request@cnidr.org sub zip Lastname Firstname
Description: Technical discussion of Z39.50-92 application development. Subscribers receive brief overview of project and information on how to access archives.
RFC 1689 Networked Information Retrieval: Tools and Groups August 1994
IETF Groups
The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is the protocol engineering, development and standardisation arm of the Internet. It has grown to be a large open international community of network designers, operators, vendors and researchers concerned with the evolution of the Internet protocol architecture and the smooth operation of the Internet.
IETF Information including RFCs and Internet Drafts is available by anonymous FTP from several sites.
East Coast (US) Address: ds.internic.net
West Coast (US) Address: ftp.isi.edu
Europe Address: nic.nordu.net
Pacific Rim Address: munnari.oz.au
(The Internet-Drafts on this machine are stored in Unix compressed form (.Z).)
In addition the information is available via gopher from cnri.reston.va.us under the menu item "Internet Society".
NIR Group Name: Integrated Directory Services (IDS)
Sponsoring Organisation: Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF)
Working subgroups: NONE
Description of main group:
The Integrated Directory Services Working Group (IDS) is chartered to facilitate the integration and interoperability of current and future directory services into a unified directory service. This work will unite directory services based on a heterogeneous set of directory services protocols (X.500, WHOIS++, etc.). In addition to specifying technical requirements for the integration, the IDS group will also contribute to the administrative and maintenance issues of directory service offerings by publishing guidelines on directory data integrity, maintenance, security, and privacy and legal issues for users and administrators of directories.
Membership is open, and is not limited to IETF attendees. A full charter for this group is available for anonymous FTP from ds.internic.net as ids-charter.txt in directory ietf/ids.
Location details: Site: ds.internic.net or any Internet Draft Server (see sub-section entitled IETF groups) Directory: internet-drafts. All IDS document file names start with either draft-ietf-disi or draft-ietf-ids.
Document Title: FYI 11, RFC 1292, "Catalog of Available X.500 Implementations", R. Lang, R. Wright. Location details: Available for anonymous FTP from Site: ds.internic.net Full file name: RFC-1292.txt
An update of this document is in preparation: Document Title: "A Revised Catalog of Available X.500 Implementations", A. Getchell, S. Sataluri. Location details: Available for anonymous FTP from Site: ds.internic.net Full file name: draft-ietf-ids-catalog-00.txt
Document Title: FYI 21, RFC 1491, "A Survey of Advanced Usages of X.500", C. Weider, R. Wright. Location details: Available for anonymous FTP from Site: ds.internic.net Full file name: RFC-1491.txt
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Marine, A, X.500 Pilot Projects, June 1993. Available as draft-ietf-ids-pilots-00.txt from any Internet Draft server.
NIR Group Name: Integration of Internet Information Resources (IIIR)
Sponsoring Organisation: Internet Engineering Task Forces (IETF)
Working subgroups: None
Description of main group:
The IIIR group was chartered in September 1992 to facilitate interoperability between and integration of the various Internet information services (Archie, Gopher, WAIS, etc.), just as the IETF was founded to facilitate the integration of various LANs running different protocols. It will develop, specify, and align protocols to integrate the services into a single "virtually unified information service" (VUIS).
Also, where necessary for interoperability, IIIR will create technical documentation for protocols used for information services in the internet.
Membership is open, and is not limited to IETF attendees. A full charter for this group is available via anonymous FTP from ds.internic.net as ietf/iiir/iiir-charter.txt
Location details: Site: ds.internic.net or any Internet Draft Server (see sub-section entitled IETF groups). Directory: internet-drafts All IIIR document file names start with the string 'draft-ietf-iiir-'
Weider, Chris, and Peter Deutsch, 'A vision of an integrated Internet information service', Internet Draft, March 1993. Available as draft-ietf-iiir-vision-00.txt from any Internet Draft server.
Weider, Chris, 'Resource Transponders', Internet Draft, March 1993. Available as draft-ietf-iiir-transponder-00.txt from any Internet Draft server.
Ankelesaria, et al, 'The Internet Gopher Protocol', RFC 1436, March 1993. Available from any RFC repository.
Berners-Lee, Tim. 'Hypertext Markup Language (HTML)', Internet Draft, March 1993. Available as draft-ietf-iiir-html-00.ps from any Internet Draft server.
RFC 1689 Networked Information Retrieval: Tools and Groups August 1994
Other Information:
This is a new area, one with lots of interesting open problems and the potential to help shape the future of information services on the Internet. Even if you can't make the IETF meetings, you are strongly encouraged to join the group and contribute.
NIR Group Name: Networked Information Retrieval Working Group (NIR-WG)
Sponsoring Organisation: Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and RARE (Association of European Research Networks)
Working subgroups: None
Description of main group:
There are many organizations and associations that have begun to focus on the proliferating resources and tools for networked information retrieval (NIR). The Networked Information Retrieval Group will be a cooperative effort of three major players in the field of NIR: IETF, RARE, and the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) specifically tasked to collect and disseminate information about the tools and to discuss and encourage cooperative development of current and future tools such as the archie servers, the Wide Area Information Servers (WAIS), the Internet Gopher, and the WorldWide Web (WWW).
The NIR Working Group intends to increase the useful base of information about networked information retrieval (NIR) tools, their developers, interested organizations, and other activities that relate to the production, dissemination, and support of NIR tools.
Membership is open and is not limited to attendees of the quarterly IETF meetings; the mailing list is open to all. The NIR-WG charter is available via anonymous ftp from the various IETF repositories as nir-charter.txt.
Goals:
To disseminate information about NIR tools and those groups working on them. The information in the NIR Status report will be updated and new entries added as appropriate once per year. This report will be submitted as an RFC.
Current work includes discussing the criteria for evaluating the major NIR tools available.
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Postal Address: Computing Service University of Newcastle upon Tyne Newcastle upon Tyne NE1 7RU U.K.
Telephone: +44-91-222-8250
Fax: +44-91-222-8765
---------------------------------
Name: Kevin Gamiel
Email address: kevin.gamiel@cnidr.org
Postal Address:
Clearinghouse for Networked Information Discovery and Retrieval Center for Communications - MCNC PO Box 12889 3021 Cornwallis Road Research Triangle Park, NC 27709-2889 U.S.A.
This Working Group was formed jointly in the User Services and Applications Areas of the Internet Engineering Task Force.
The RARE (Reseaux Associes pour la Recherche Europeenne) ISUS WG (Information Services and User Support Working Group) is represented by NIR-WG co-chair Jill Foster. NIR-WG information is also posted to the mailing list for the ISUS WG at "wg-isus@rare.nl".
More information about CNI (Coalition for Networked Information) may be obtained via anonymous ftp files from ftp.cni.org.
NIR Group name: Network Information Services Infrastructure (NISI) Working Group
Sponsoring Organisation: IETF
Description of main group:
The NISI Working Group will explore the requirements for common, shared Internet-wide network information services. The goal is to develop an understanding for what is required to implement an information services "infrastructure" for the Internet. Membership is open. Charter is online in the various IETF repositories as nisi-charter.txt.
Sponsoring Organisation: Internet Engineering Task Forces (IETF)
Working subgroups: NONE
Description of main group:
The OSI-DS group's mission is to enable building a global Directory Service based on X.500 and to facilitate its deployment on the Internet. The primary focus is on developing agreements and technical specifications needed to make this happen. The WG will not be directly concerned with piloting and service activities, but will liaise with such activities.
Membership is open, and is not limited to IETF attendees. A full charter for this group is available for anonymous FTP from ds.internic.net as ietf/osids/osids-charter.txt
NIR Group Name: Uniform Resource Identifiers (uri)
Sponsoring Organisation: Internet Engineering Task Forces (IETF)
Working subgroups: NONE
Description of main group:
The Uniform Resource Identifiers Archives Working Group is chartered to define a set of standards for the encoding of system independent Resource Location and Identification information for the use of Internet information services. There are three classes of information being standardized in this group:
1) Uniform Resource Locators (URLs), which specify a standardized method for encoding location and access information to resources across multiple information systems,
2) Uniform Resource Names (URNs), which specify a standardized method for encoding a unique resource identifier for a given content, and
3) Uniform Resource Citations (URCs), which specify a standardized method for encoding information about a given instantiation of a content.
The URLs allow an information service to give a user access and location information for a resource. The URN allows an information service to determine if the contents of two information resources are the same or not. The URC allows an information service to select which of a number of different encodings of a resource are appropriate for a given user's retrieval capabilities, and may contain such things as file size and compression techniques.
Membership is open, and is not limited to IETF attendees. A full charter for this group is available for anonymous FTP from ds.internic.net as /ietf/uri/uri-charter.txt
Berners-Lee, Tim, 'Uniform Resource Locators', Internet Draft, March 1993. Available as draft-ietf-uri-url-00.ps from any Internet Draft server.
Weider, Chris and Peter Deutsch, 'Uniform Resource Names', Internet Draft, May 1993. Available as draft-ietf-uri-resource-names-00.txt from any Internet Draft server.
NIR Group Name: Whois and Network Information Lookup Service (WNILS)
Sponsoring Organisation: Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF)
Working subgroups: Name of subgroup: Mailinglist-Address: ietf-wnils@ucdavis.edu
Description of main group:
This description is the current WNILS-WG charter.
The Network Information Center (NIC) maintains the central NICNAME database and server, defined in RFC 954, providing online look-up of individuals, network organizations, key nodes, and other information of interest to those who use the Internet. Other distributed directory information servers and information retrieval tools have been developed and it is anticipated more will be created. Many sites now maintain local directory servers with information about individuals, departments and services at that specific site. Typically these directory servers are network accessible. Because these servers are local, there are now wide variations in the type of data stored, access methods, search schemes, and user interfaces. The purpose of the Whois and Network Information Lookup Service (WNILS) working group is to expand and define the standard for WHOIS services, to resolve issues associated with the variations in access and to promote a consistent and predictable service across the network.
Goals and Milestones:
Done Review and approve the charter making any changes deemed necessary. Examine the particular functional needs for expanded whois directory service. Begin work on a framework for recommendations. Assign writing assignments for first draft of document.
12/1/93 Submit the Whois and Network Information Lookup Service Recommendations document to the IESG as an Internet Draft.
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12/1/93 Submit the WHOIS++ protocol document to the IESG as an Internet Draft.
12/1/93 Submit the "Architecture of the Whois++ Index Service" document to the IESG as a revised Internet Draft.
12/1/93 Freeze all work on the Internet Drafts for 6 months for software development.
Membership is open to attendees of the quarterly IETF meetings; the mailing list is open to all. The WNILS-WG charter can be obtained via anonymous ftp from the Document Archive sites listed in the Networked Information Retrieval Working Group (WNILS-WG) template.
NIR Group Name: Internet Research Task Force Research Group on Resource Discovery and Directory Service (IRTF-RD)
Sponsoring Organisation: Internet Society
Working subgroups: None
Description of main group:
The IRTF-RD group is focused on problems of scale that will arise in resource discovery systems in the next 3-5 years. We divide these scaling problems into three dimensions: volume of information, size of the user base, and information diversity.
Our goal is to explore techniques for dealing with these problems through a set of interrelated prototypes demonstrating advances in each of these dimensions. Briefly, our current approaches are: - deal with information diversity through a coordinated set of techniques to gather, transform, and manage entropy of data - deal with user scale through large scale replication - deal with information volume using a combination of views, space efficient indexing, and customization w.r.t. vocabulary, search methods, and personal user history We expect these approaches to evolve significantly over time.
Membership of this group is closed. We will consider new members, with two constraints. First, the group must be kept small and focused to make substantive progress - at most 4 or 5 members seems appropriate at this time. Second, prospective members must be active resource discovery researchers, who will bring clear strengths to the group. Prospective members should send a vitae and a one page position paper describing what they propose to do to advance the group's efforts, addressed to the group chair.
The group currently consists of: Mic Bowman (Transarc, Inc.) Peter Danzig (University of Southern California) Udi Manber (University of Arizona) Mike Schwartz (University of Colorado - Boulder; chair)
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C. Mic Bowman, Peter B. Danzig and Michael F. Schwartz. Research Problems for Scalable Internet Resource Discovery. Technical Report CU-CS-643-93, Department of Computer Science,
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University of Colorado, Boulder, March 1993. To appear, Proceedings of INET '93. Available by anonymous FTP from ftp.cs.colorado.edu in the file pub/cs/techreports/schwartz/PostScript/RD.ResearchProblems.ps.Z (compressed PostScript) or in the file pub/cs/techreports/schwartz/ASCII/RD.ResearchProblems.txt.Z (compressed ASCII).
C. Mic Bowman, Peter B. Danzig, Udi Manber and Michael F. Schwartz. Scalable Internet Resource Discovery: Research Problems and Approaches. Technical Report CU- CS-679-93,
Department of Computer Science, University of Colorado, Boulder, October 1993. To appear, Communications of the ACM, 1994. A pre-publication version of this paper is available by anonymous FTP and e-mail from ftp.cs.colorado.edu in the file pub/cs/techreports/schwartz/PostScript/RD.ResearchProblems.Jour.ps.Z (compressed PostScript) or in the file pub/cs/techreports/schwartz/ASCII/RD.ResearchProblems.Jour.txt.Z (compressed ASCII).
The Z39.50 Implementors group (ZIG) is a volunteer organization consisting of representatives of most of the organizations in the United States and Canada that are actively engaged in implementing the Z39.50 protocol. This includes the United States Library of Congress, The National Library of Canada, the major bibliographic utilities, many library automation vendors, and other information service providers. The group is a volunteer effort whose meetings are open at no charge to all. The group meets about 3 times a year and conducts its activities extensively on its mailing list which is also open to any interested party.
The group was originally formed to deal with interoperability issues among the Z39.50 implementations that were beginning to emerge in 1989 and 1990 but the group has since expanded its role and has now become the primary forum in which new features and versions of the Z39.50 are developed.
Documentation and References for the Z39.50 Protocol
American National Standard Information Retrieval Application Service Definition and Protocol Specification for Open Systems Interconnection Version 2, National Information Standards Organization, July 1992
Mark Hinnebusch "A Primer on Z39.50 Parts 1-8", Academic and Library Computing Volume 9, Numbers 2-9, February-October 1992, Meckler Corporation, Westport CN. (ISSN 1055-4769)
Mark Hinnebusch "The Z39.50 Explain Service", Campus Wide Information Systems, Volume 10, Number 1, January/February 1993, Meckler Corporation, Westport, CT. (ISSN 1065-0741)
Michael Buckland and Clifford Lynch. "THE LINKED SYSTEMS PROTOCOL AND THE FUTURE OF BIBLIOGRAPHIC NETWORKS AND SYSTEMS,"
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Information Technology and Libraries 6:2 (June 1987), pp. 83-88.
Michael Buckland and Clifford Lynch. "NATIONAL AND INTERNATIONAL IMPLICATIONS OF THE LINKED SYSTEMS PROTOCOL FOR ONLINE BIBLIOGRAPHICAL SYSTEMS," Cataloging and Classification Quarterly 8:3/4 (Spring 1988), pp. 15-33.
Clifford Lynch. "INTERSYSTEM LINKING AND DISTRIBUTED DATABASE TECHNOLOGY: A COMPARISON OF TWO APPROACHES TO THE CONSTRUCTION OF NETWORK-BASED INFORMATION UTILITIES," Proceedings of the Fourth Integrated Online Library Systems Meeting, New York, New York, May 10-11, 1989. (Medford, NJ: Learned Information, Inc., 1989), pp. 107-112.
Clifford A. Lynch "LIBRARY AUTOMATION AND THE NATIONAL RESEARCH NETWORK," EDUCOM Review (Fall 1989), pp. 21-28.
Clifford A. Lynch. "ACCESS TECHNOLOGY FOR NETWORK INFORMATION RESOURCES," CAUSE/EFFECT (Summer 1990), pp. 15-20.
Clifford A. Lynch; Cecilia M. Preston. "INTERNET ACCESS TO INFORMATION RESOURCES," Annual Review of Information Science and Technology (ARIST) Volume 25. (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1990), pp. 264-312.
Clifford A. Lynch. "THE CLIENT-SERVER MODEL IN INFORMATION RETRIEVAL," Interfaces for Information Retrieval and Online Systems: The State of the Art Martin Dillon, ed. (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1991); pp. 301-318.
Clifford A. Lynch. "INFORMATION RETRIEVAL AS A NETWORK APPLICATION," Library Hi Tech 8:4, Issue 32 (1990), pp. 59-74.
Clifford A. Lynch. "THE Z39.50 INFORMATION RETRIEVAL PROTOCOL: AN OVERVIEW AND STATUS REPORT," Computer Communications Review 21:1 (Sigcomm) (January 1991), pp. 58-70.
Clifford A. Lynch. THE Z39.50 PROTOCOL: QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS. Produced as a pamphlet by Data Research Associates (1991).
Dennis Lynch "Z39.50 Extended Services" Campus Wide Information Systems Volume 10, Number 3 May/June 1993, Meckler Corporation, Westport, CT (ISSN 1065 0741)
Mark H Needleman. "The Z39.50 Protocol: An Implementor's Perspective", Resource Sharing and Information Networks Volume 8 Number 1, 1992, The Haworth Press Inc, Binghamton, NY (ISSN 0737-7797)
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Kunze, John A. "Nonbibliographic Applications of Z39.50." The Public-Access Computer Systems Review 3, no. 5 (1992): 4-30. (Refereed Article.) To retrieve this article, send the following e-mail message to LISTSERV@UHUPVM1 or LISTSERV@UHUPVM1.UH.EDU: GET KUNZE PRV3N5 F=MAIL.
Z39.50 is a US ANSI standard protocol for information retrieval. It uses a client server model that allows clients ( or origins in Z39.50 terminology) to search servers (targets in Z39.50 usage) and retrieve records from remote databases. The type and format of the data retrieved is not constrained by the protocol but is agreed to by the origin and the target. There is a mechanism that allows popular record syntax's to be registered and then referred to by well known identifiers. Z39.50 is an OSI application layer protocol; that is, it is designed to make use of the OSI presentation layer protocol. It may be used with or without the presentation protocol, and below that, it is irrelevant (to the Z39.50 protocol) what protocols are used. Most implementations of Z39.50 currently run directly over TCP/IP.
User's View:
Users (either human or electronic) run client software to connect with servers to retrieve information using the Z39.50 protocol. Many clients already exist at least in prototype version today and more are being written. Most of the major library automation vendors have announced that they will be supporting Z39.50 in either client or server mode or both. Many of the major information vendors either currently have or are working on implementations of Z39.50 for their systems. There are also a couple of Z39.50 implementations that are expected to be put in the public domain at some point. The recently announced FREEWAIS software incorporates Z39.50 Version 2 into it (the older version used a variant of the 1988 version 1 protocol). The Library of Congress acts as the maintenance agency for Z39.50 and can be contacted for a list of registered Implementors.
Z39.50 provides a protocol mechanism for accessing remote information sources. It defines the model for the interaction between two sides, a client and a server. It makes no assumptions or presumptions about how the data is actually organized in the server, nor about how the data is presented to the end user by the client.
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The model postulates one or more databases on the remote system that can be searched using attributes from defined search attribute sets, creating a result set. Records can be retrieved from the result set using agreed upon record formats.
Information types supported:
The Z39.50 protocol was designed as a general purpose search and retrieval mechanism that could be used with a wide variety of data types. The MARC format (a format used for cataloging library material among other things) and a search attribute set suitable for bibliographic and similar types of data are registered within the current version of the standard. It is assumed that, as the protocol begins to be used by other communities and for other types of data, other attribute sets and record syntaxes will be developed. This process has already begun and a generic record syntax and attribute set are already under development, as well as some others, specifically those supporting chemical structures, general science and technology, and business information. The design philosophy behind Z39.50 is that it will be used with other standards such as Postscript, SGML, ODIF (and others), to communicate a wide variety of data types, including full text, images, and many others.
RFC 1689 Networked Information Retrieval: Tools and Groups August 1994
RARE Groups
RARE (Reseaux Associes pour la Recherche Europeenne) is the Association of European Networking Organizations and their users. RARE's aim is to overcome national boundaries in research networking by creating a harmonized computer communications infrastructure for the European research community. At this point in time RARE has over 40 members, most of which are national networking organizations providing networking services to their national research and education community.
RARE's technical programme is carried out by volunteers working in a number of Working Groups.
For further information on RARE contact:
RARE Secretariat Singel 466-468 NL-1017 AW AMSTERDAM
Telephone number +31-20-639-1131 Fax number +31-20-639-3289
NIR Group Name: RARE Information Services and User Support Working Group
Sponsoring Organisation: RARE (Reseaux Associes pour la Recherche Europeenne)
Working subgroups (of relevance to nir):
Name of subgroup: MMIS Task Force Mailinglist-Address: mmis@mailbase.ac.uk
Name of subgroup: NIR Task Force Mailinglist-Address: nir@mailbase.ac.uk
Name of subgroup: UNITE Task Force Mailinglist-Address: unite@mailbase.ac.uk
Description of main group:
The Information Services and User Support (ISUS) Working Group has been established by the RARE Technical Committee as one of the major working groups in the RARE Technical Programme. ISUS is concerned with all aspects of networked information services, group communications and network user support. It is open to all those involved in working in these areas and should include:
Network User Support Staff: National and European Support Staff (whether RARE, RIPE, EARN, Eunet etc.) Site Computing Centre Support Staff Special subject related User Support Staff
Library Staff Networked Information Providers Networked Information Service Providers Application Developers
The ISUS WG mailing list will act both as a forum for discussion amongst experts in this field and as a means for disseminating information to the wider community.
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The ISUS Working Group is chartered to have a very broad area of interest which is broken down into several sub-areas: Network User Support Asynchronous Group Communication Networked Information Retrieval and Services Liaison
Current tasks being worked on in the area of NIR include:
o Coordination of NIR services in Europe
o Collection of information related to NIR tools and groups. This is a joint effort with the IETF and CNI.
o Network Interface to everything (UNITE). This group is starting to look at the user requirements for a single interface to the network (network information services, email, bulletin boards, etc.). (unite@mailbase.ac.uk)
o Multimedia Information Services task force (MMIS). This group is a joint task force of the RARE ISUS Working Group and RARE Interactive Multimedia Working Group (mmis@mailbase.ac.uk).
charter: anonymous ftp from mailbase.ac.uk file: /pub/lists/wg-isus/files/isus.charter
Name of group: USMARC Advisory Group; OCLC Internet Resources Cataloging Experiment
Sponsoring Organisations: OCLC, Library of Congress, USMARC Advisory Group
Working subgroups: None
Description of main group:
OCLC and the Library of Congress have formed a working group to consider how libraries can create cataloging records for online information resources. The group initiated a cataloging experiment designed to test and verify the applicability of the cataloging rules and the USMARC format for computer files. Guidelines have been written for cataloging Internet resources and were considered by the American Library Association committee responsible for maintaining the Anglo- American Cataloging Rules. Changes to the USMARC format were initiated to accommodate a subset of these materials (electronic data resources, such as software, electronic text, bibliographic and nonbibliographic databases). USMARC format changes which were approved included an identification of type of file and a field for location and access of the resource (very much like a URL).
The group is continuing its work by looking at how online systems and services can be accommodated in USMARC. This work will be done within the USMARC Advisory Group of the American Library Association, which considers changes to the USMARC formats. Data elements will be defined with mapping to MARC fields; in some cases new fields will be proposed. This will be accomplished in conjunction with efforts by other working groups (e.g., Government Information Locator Service, or GILS).
A proposal was presented and approved in February 1994 to the USMARC Advisory Group to add data elements to the Electronic Location and Access Field (USMARC field 856). Included among these was a subfield for URL (Uniform Resource Locator). It is intended to be used instead of or in addition to other data identifying location of and access to
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Postal address: Network Development and MARC Standards Office, Library of Congress, Washington, DC 20540-4020
Telephone: +1-202-707-5092
Fax: +1-202-707-6269
-------------------------------
Name: Erik Jul
Email address: ekj@oclc.org
Postal address: OCLC, Inc. 6565 Franz Rd. Dublin OH 43017-0702
Telephone: +1-614-764-4364
Fax: +1-614-764-2344
----------------------------
Name: Priscilla Caplan
Email address: p-caplan@uchicago.edu
Postal Address: University of Chicago Library, 1100 E. 57th St., Chicago, IL 60637
Telephone: +1-312-702-5079
Fax: +1-312-702-6623
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----------------------------
Name: William W. Jones, Jr.
Email Address: jones@acfcluster.nyu.edu
Postal Address: New York University/Elmer Holmes Bobst Library, Technical and Automated Services Division, 70 Washington Square South, New York, NY 10012
Telephone: +1-212-998-4070
Fax: +1-212-995-4070
---------------------------
Name: Nancy Olson
Email Address: nbolson@msus1.msus.edu
Postal Address: Memorial Library, Mankato State University, Mankato, MN 56001
Telephone: +1-507-389-5062
Fax: +1-507-389-5488
----------------------------
Name: Glenn Patton
Email address: gep@oclc.org
Postal address: OCLC, Inc. 6565 Franz Rd. Dublin OH 43017-0702
Telephone: +1-800-848-5878
Fax: +1-614-764-0155
--------------------------------
Name: Martin Dillon
Email address: mjd@oclc.org
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Postal address: OCLC, Inc. 6565 Franz Rd. Dublin OH 43017-0702
94-2.doc (Proposal 94-2: Addition of Subfields $g and $3 to Field 856 Electronic Location and Access) in the USMARC Holdings/Bibliographic Formats: Document) 94-2.cov (Cover sheet with status information) 94-3.doc (Proposal 94-3: Addition of Subfield $u (Uniform Resource Locator) to Field 856 in the USMARC Holdings/Bibliographic Formats: Document) 94-3.cov (Cover sheet with status information) 93-4.doc (Proposal 93-4: Changes to the USMARC Bibliographic Format (Computer Files) to Accommodate Online Information Resources: Document) 93-4.cov (Proposal 93-4: Cover sheet with status information) dp69.doc (Discussion Paper No. 69: Accommodating Online Systems and Services within USMARC: Document) dp69.cov (Discussion Paper No. 69: Cover sheet with status information)
Location details
Telnet to: marvel.loc.gov Login: marvel
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Select: Services to Libraries and Publishers Select: USMARC Standards Select: USMARC Listserv See list of documents
-or-
Site: listserv@sun7.loc.gov
Send email message with
get usmarc 93-4.doc get usmarc 93-4.cov get usmarc dp69.doc get usmarc dp69.cov etc.
"Assessing Information on the Internet: Toward Providing Library Services for Computer-Mediated Communication". Dublin, OH: OCLC Online Computer Library Center, 1993. Available in print form from OCLC, Inc. for $20 or electronically from:
Proposal 94-2: Addition of Subfields $g and $3 to Field 856 Electronic Location and Access) in the USMARC Holdings/Bibliographic Formats)
Proposal 94-3: Addition of Subfield $u (Uniform Resource Locator) to Field 856 in the USMARC Holdings/Bibliographic Formats
Discussion Paper No. 69: Accommodating Online Systems and Services in USMARC (Washington: Library of Congress, Network Development and MARC Standards Office, Apr. 1993).
Proposal 93-4: Changes to the USMARC Bibligraphic Format (Computer Files) to Accommodate Online Information Resources (Washington: Library of Congress, Network Development and MARC
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RFC 1689 Networked Information Retrieval: Tools and Groups August 1994
8. Security Considerations
Security issues are not discussed in this memo.
9. Acknowledgements
The report was very much a collaborative effort of the members of the NIR WG and in particular Peter Deutsch (who contributed the mailing list section and the basis for Section 5), April Marine, Rick Rodgers, Lars-Gunnar Olsson, Farhad Anklesaria, Marsha Perrott, Kevin Gamiel, George Brett, Barbara Thomas and all those who helped review the document. Special thanks are due to all those contributors who took the time to submit and update descriptions of their NIR tools and groups; their names are included in the templates in Sections 6 and 7.
Before final submission of the report as an RFC, independent reviewers from around the world took two or three templates each and checked them out for accuracy and currency as best they could. They liaised with the original template authors over the changes they made. The volunteers were: Larry Masinter, Marilyn Martin, Sinha Velu, Ton Verschuren, Shirley Browne, Alfred Vella, Bert Stals, Yannis Corovesis, Gerard Egan, Robert Janz and Andy Linton. They provided some very valuable input.
10. Author's Address
Jill Foster Computing Service University of Newcastle upon Tyne Claremont Road Newcastle upon Tyne NE1 7RU UK
RFC 1689 Networked Information Retrieval: Tools and Groups August 1994
APPENDIX A
NIR TOOL Template (last updated 22.12.93)
Purpose and scope:
This template is to be used to collect the information necessary to identify and track the development of networked information retrieval tools. It is intended that the main part of this will be completed by the main individual responsible for the tool. Sections of the template may require completion by others.
The NIR tools included are defined by enumeration. The IETF/RARE/CNI NIR-WG welcome suggestions for others to be included.
NIR Tools:
Alex archie gopher Hytelnet Netfind Prospero Veronica WAIS (including freeWAIS) WHOIS World Wide Web (including Mosaic) X.500 White Pages
New entries: Please complete this template and return it to Jill.Foster@newcastle.ac.uk (NIR-WG co-chair). Receipt of your message will be acknowledged.
Please imbed descriptive text by at least one more column than the heading for that item:
For example:
Brief description of tool:
This is the best application ever seen. It makes finding information very easy. This is the decription imbedded one more column.
Updates: updates to existing information on NIR Tools may be sent by the appropriate contact person at any time to:
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nir-updates@cnidr.org
The full report will be updated annually and will form the basis of a "snapshot" report on the activities in the area of networked information retrieval (NIR).
-------------------------x---- cut here ----x--------------------------
Date template updated or checked: (e.g., 02 November, 1992) By: Name: Email address:
Brief Description of Tool: Note: This should be a maximum of 100 line description which should cover the following: - overview of use, purpose, scope and characteristics - user's view - information provider's view - information types supported (e.g., text, sound, etc.)
Location of more information: [Such as installation instructions copyright statements, warnings & bug reports etc.
Eventually this will be the Unique Resource Identifiers of the documents]
Latest version number:
Brief Scope and Characteristics:
General comments:
Future plans: Items included here could include - optional items to come. - plans for moving to international standards - plans for interoperating with other NIR tools - other functionality to be supported
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List of sites which are willing to act as demonstration sites for this application. [Duplicate for each site] Site name: Access details: [e.g., telnet archie.sura.net login as archie ] ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Documentation:
The following is a list of suggested items to be found in a document archive. Note that the location pointers below could be replaced in the future by the "Uniform Resource Name".
o current overview o instructions to information providers o Frequently Asked Questions o user manuals o training materials - tutorials - canned demos - sample session (screen dumps) - videos - etc. o miscellaneous documents
[Duplicate the following for each existing document as necessary]
Document Title: Location details: Site: Full file name:
RFC 1689 Networked Information Retrieval: Tools and Groups August 1994
APPENDIX B
NIR Group Template (last updated 22.12.93)
Purpose and scope:
This template is to be used to collect the information necessary to identify and track major groups that are working to promote or develop networked information retrieval. It is intended that this will be completed by the group representative.
The groups included are defined by enumeration. The IETF/RARE/CNI NIR-WG welcome suggestions for other groups to be included.
Groups:
CNI Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) Architectures and Standards Directories and Resource Information Services TopNode for Networked Information Resources, Services, and Tools
CNIDR Clearing House for Networked Information Discovery and Retrieval
IETF Integrated Directory Services (IDS) Integration of Internet Information Resources (IIIR) Networked Information Retrieval (NIR) joint IETF/RARE WG Network Information Services Infrastructure (NISI) OSI-Directory Service (OSI-DS) Uniform Resource Identifiers (URI) Whois and Network Information Lookup Service (WNILS)
IRTF Internet Research Task Force Research Group on Resource Discovery and Directory Service (IRTF-RD)
NISO Z39.50 Implementors Group
RARE Information Services and User Support Working Group (ISUS)
USMARC/OCLC USMARC Advisory Group; OCLC Internet Resources Cataloging Experiment (USMARC/OCLC)
New Entries: Please complete this template for your group or organisation and return it to Jill.Foster@newcastle.ac.uk (NIR-WG co-chair). Receipt of your message will be acknowledged.
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Please imbed descriptive text by at least one more column than the heading for that item:
For example:
Description of main group:
This is the most active NIR group. This is the decription imbedded one more column.
Updates: updates to existing information on NIR Groups may be sent by the appropriate contact person at any time to:
nir-updates@cnidr.org
The full report will be updated annually and will form the basis of a "snapshot" report on the activities in the area of networked information retrieval (NIR).
-----------------------x---- cut here ----x----------------------------
Date template updated or checked: (e.g., 02 November, 1992) By: Name: Email address:
Working subgroups: Name of subgroup: Mailinglist-Address:
Description of main group:
[Description of the scope and purpose of the group and the current tasks being worked on. (Recommended maximum of 100 lines.) Please indicate whether membership is open or closed. Include a pointer to an on-line charter if appropriate]
Created-By: Peter Deutsch Email Address: peterd@bunyip.com Last Updated: 16 December 1993 Comments: Please send comments, corrections and additions to the author at the above address.
/* The following mailing lists are in IAFA format. NIR Groups and */ /* Tool developers are encouraged to make such descriptions */ /* available for their lists. */
Description: This mailing list is for people interested in the archie project and its future developments. Announcements of upgrades, new services, etc. are made to this list.
Administration: By listowner Peter Scott aa375@freenet.carleton.ca
Description: To inform members of new version of the software, and to keep users informed of new/changed/defunct Telnet-accessible sites. To subscribe send email message to listserv@kentvm.kent.edu with no subject, and
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sub hytel-l firstname lastname as the body of the message.
Description: This mailing list is really two one-way mailing lists. Send mail to INFO-PROSPERO to obtain information about Prospero, papers or the release. Mail to INFO-PROSPERO will not be passed on to subscribers. INFO-PROSPERO is also the list to which we will send status updates and information on how to obtain new releases.
Archive: Via anonymous FTP to PROSPERO.ISI.EDU as /pub/prospero/mail/info-prospero.arc
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Via prospero in the "#/INET/EDU/ISI/GUEST/prototype" virtual system as /sites/isi.edu/pub/prospero/mail/info-prospero.arc.
-----------------------------
Address: prospero@isi.edu
Administration: prospero-request@isi.edu
Description: This mailing list is for general discussion of Prospero, for announcements of new sites that have come on board, and for announcments of directories that people have created to organize the information already accessible.
Archive: Via anonymous FTP to PROSPERO.ISI.EDU as /pub/prospero/mail/prospero.arc
Via Prospero in the "#/INET/EDU/ISI/GUEST/prototype" virtual system as /sites/isi.edu/pub/prospero/mail/prospero.arc.
All of the CNI lists are managed with the Unix-Listprocessor software.
To join any of them mail to: listproc@cni.org
sub cni-<groupname> Firstname Lastname
All CNI list archives are available as: URL:ftp://ftp.cni.org/CNI/forums/cni-<groupname> URL:gopher//gopher.cni.org 70/CNI Working Group Forums/ cni-<groupname>
--------------------------------
Mailinglist-Name: CNI News and Announcements
Address: cni-announce@cni.org
--------------------------------
Mailinglist-Name: Architecture and Standards Working Group
Address: cni-architecture@cni.org
--------------------------------
Mailinglist-Name: Copyright and Intellectual Property Forum
Address: cni-copyright@cni.org
-------------------------------
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Mailinglist-Name: Directories and Information Resource Services Working Group
Address: cni-directories@cni.org
--------------------------------
Mailinglist-Name: CNI Legislation, Codes, Policies and Practices Working Group Forum
Address: cni-legislation@cni.org
-----------------------------
Mailinglist-Name: CNI Management & Professional & User Education Working Group Forum
Address: cni-management@cni.org
---------------------------------
Mailinglist-Name: CNI Modernization of Scholarly Publication Working Group Forum
Address: cni-modernization@cni.org
--------------------------------
Mailinglist-Name: CNI Access to Public Information Working Group Forum
Address: cni-pubinfo@cni.org
-------------------------------
Mailinglist-Name: CNI Teaching and Learning Working Group Forum
Address: cni-teaching@cni.org
-------------------------------
Mailinglist-Name: CNI Transformation of Scholarly Communication Working Group Forum
Address: cni-transformation@cni.org
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-------------------------------
Mailinglist-Name: TopNode for Networked Information Resources, Services and Tools
Address: cnidir@cni.org cni-directories@cni.org
Administration: listserv@cni.org SUB cni-directories Lastname Firstname
Administration: zip-request@cnidr.org sub zip Lastname Firstname
Description: Technical discussion of Z39.50-92 application development. Subscribers receive brief overview of project and information on how to access archives.
Mailinglist-Name: NIR: Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) WG on Network Information Retrieval
Address: nir@mailbase.ac.uk
Administration: Auto subscriptions to: mailbase@mailbase.ac.uk "subscribe nir firstname lastname" Human admin to: nir-request@mailbase.ac.uk
Description: This mailing list is intended to act as a clearing-house for discussions of Networked Information Retrieval and the active research projects in this field (eg WAIS, WWW, Gopher).
Description: This mailing list is used by the IETF Whois and Network Information Lookup Service (WNILS) working group which is defining enhancements to whois.
Mailinglist-Name: IAFA: Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) Internet Anonymous FTP Archive working group
Address: iafa@bunyip.com
Administration: iafa-request@bunyip.com
Description: This mailing list is for people who are involved in the Internet Anonymous FTP Archives Working Group of the IETF. This group was involved in standardizing the encoding of information at anonymous FTP archives and thus is of interest to operators and users of the archie system. It came to completion in November, 1992 and produced two documents which have been presented to the IETF as informational
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/* The following Usenet newsgroups discuss various issues in */ /* resource discovery or specific NIR projects. */
Newsgroup-Name: comp.archives.admin
Mailinglist-Gate: <unknown>
Description: This group discusses problems in administering Internet archives. It has also been used as an informal source of announcements for project releases, a place for new-comers to ask questions, etc.
Description: This group was created to host discussions about the Wide Area Information Server Also included are information and help with the public domain release available from Thinking Machine Corp. and setting up your own WAIS server.
Keywords: WAIS, resource discovery, indexing, Internet
Description: This group was created to host discussions about the World Wide Web distributed hypertext information services project based at CERN in Switzerland, including discussion of the many public domain implementations of WWW clients and servers available.
Keywords: World Wide Web, campus-wide information systems, resource discovery, indexing, Internet
Description: This group was created to host discussions about the Gopher distributed information project, based at University of Minnesota, including discussion of the many public domain implementations of Gopher clients and servers available. It has been superceeded by the group "comp.infosystems.gopher" and its use is discouraged.
Keywords: Gopher, campus-wide information systems, resource discovery, indexing, Internet
RFC 1689 Networked Information Retrieval: Tools and Groups August 1994
Newsgroup-Name: alt.internet.services
Description: This newsgroup is for people interested in Internet-related services, with a focus at the user level. Announcements and discussions of issues related to archie are presented here, as well as discussions of more general issues relating to Internet services.
RFC 1689 Networked Information Retrieval: Tools and Groups August 1994
APPENDIX D
COMING ATTRACTIONS
This section will be used to keep a note of NIR Tools which are considered by the NIR Group to be sufficiently well developed to include here, but that are not yet in widespread use.
Hyper-G is the name of an ambitious hypermedia project currently being developed as a joint effort by a number of institutes of the IIG (Institutes for Information-Processing Graz) and the Computing and Information Services Center of the Graz University of Technology and the Austrian Computer Society.
Hyper-G is designed as a general-purpose, large-scale, multi-user, distributed hypermedia information system. As such, it combines concepts of hypermedia, information retrieval systems, documentation systems with aspects of communication and collaboration, and computer supported teaching and learning. It also provides seamless integration of other systems (e.g., World-Wide Web, Gopher, WAIS) that also operate under the client/server paradigm and allows remote logins to interactive services.
In addition to hypertext links, Hyper-G allows navigation through hierarchies, queries (including full text), guided tours, and is multilingual.
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Hyper-G is currently operated at some 10 locations throughout the world, including a University Information System at the Graz Technical University. Clients and the server are available without fee for educational institutions, and are distributed as binaries for a number of platforms.
Fairly sophisticated terminal viewer with ~50 commands, multi- language user interface, history, authoring capabilities (text documents and links) and the ability to speak to gopher, World-Wide-Web, WAIS and to start telnet sessions.
General comments:
Future plans:
The terminal viewer will probably remain rather stable in the future. Our main effort now goes into the development of clients for X-Windows and MS-Windows.
Preliminary version of a Hyper-G client for MS-Windows 3.1 and Windows NT. Currently mostly identical to the UNIX curses client. An exception is its ability to elegantly import and export RTF text files to/from Hyper-G, and its multimedia capabilities.
General comments:
Future plans:
Will become more fancy (menus, icons, buttons...) in the near future.
List of sites which are willing to act as demonstration sites for this application.
Site name: hyperg.tu-graz.ac.at Access details: 'rlogin hyperg.tu-graz.ac.at' or 'telnet hyperg.tu-graz.ac.at', login 'info'
(rlogin has the advantage that the terminal size of xterms is handled correctly (can even be changed in the middle of a session)
Note: The same information is available through Gopher and WWW gateways. Gopher: host gopher.tu-graz.ac.at, port 70 WWW: URL=http://www.tu-graz.ac.at:80/ROOT
Document Title: Most of the documentation is available on-line in the Graz server. The server distribution include man-pages
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of the additional authoring tools and utilities that are supplied with the server. The ideas behind Hyper-G are described in a number of research papers (see Bibliography).
Location details: Site: iicm.tu-graz.ac.at Full file name: look in directory /pub/Hyper-G/doc
Kappe F.: Aspects of a Modern Multi-Media Information System. IIG Report 308, IIG, Graz University of Technology, Austria, June 1991. Available by anonymous ftp from iicm.tu-graz.ac.at:/pub/Hyper-G/doc/report308.ps.Z
Kappe F., Maurer H., Sherbakov N.: Hyper-G - A Universal Hypermedia System. Journal of Educational Multimedia and Hypermedia, Vol. 2, No. 1, pp. 39-66 (1993). Also available by anonymous ftp from iicm.tu-graz.ac.at:/pub/Hyper-G/doc/report333.txt.Z
Kappe F., Pani G., Schnabel F.: The Architecture of a Massively Distributed Hypermedia System. Internet Research: Electronic Networking Applications and Policy, Vol. 3, No. 1, pp. 10-24; Meckler (Spring 1993)
Kappe F., Maurer H.: Hyper-G: A Large Universal Hypermedia System and Some Spin-Offs; ACM Computer Graphics, experimental special online issue; available by anonymous ftp from siggraph.org in directory publications/May_93_online/Kappe.Maurer (May 1993)
Kappe F.: Hyper-G: A Distributed Hypermedia System; Proc. INET '93, San Francisco, California, pp. DCC-1 - DCC-9 (Aug. 1993).
A tool to aid users in the efficient retrieval of documents, s/w, and the like from servers ( anonymous FTP, FTAM, .. ) connected to the network. In principle, it uses the X.500 Directory framework to store information about the network. This includes the network configuration, the properties of the links that connect the network elements, location of servers and their contents. When a user looks for a particular document or s/w the above information is used to search for the object starting from the server that is "nearest" (cheapest) to the user.
The X.500 directory services is used in several stages get list of file-servers get path to file servers get attributes for computing cost of paths search for file that is being sought
However, under present circumstances, due to lack of deployment of network information in the directory, when information is unavailable from X.500, alternate sources/methods are used. [Static-lists of file-servers, or lists of file servers from other clients (e.g., archie); Paths and/or costs are obtained from static lists or derived by other direct means (e.g., ping, traceroute); file information is sought from other servers (e.g., archie).]
User's View:
A "single window" view of the public archives connected to the network. It locates the server that contains the sought object and is near(/cheap/fast) server.
Query of files based on incomplete name is supported. The system also supports queries based on keywords.
Information Provider's View:
The information about the server contents have to be updated
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at a single place- namely, the local Directory Service Agent. The Directory Service Agent makes the information globally accessible. It is not necessary to carry out periodic updates on one or more information servers.
- information types supported (e.g., text, sound, etc.)
Since the system supports query on name and keywords (not on contents) all kinds of information may be supported.
Address: spp@aic.co.jp Administration: spp-request@aic.co.jp Description: Technical discussion related to representation of network information in the directory and its usage is carried out in this group.
NIR Tool Name: whois++ and the whois++ index service
Brief Description of Tool:
whois++ and the whois++ index service are extensions of the WHOIS protocol. They are designed to a) subsume in a standardized fashion the many enhancements which have been added to individual WHOIS servers; b) extend the flexibility of WHOIS by enriching the query syntax, and c) provide a distributed indexing system to tie the various whois++ servers into a distributed information lookup service.
The protocols describe two logically distinct types of servers that an information provider can set up. The first type is the base-level whois++ server. This contains primary information, such as entries for individual people or entries describing resources available locally. For example, if one wished to provide a campus directory through whois++, one would set up a base-level whois++ server that contained entries for each student. In addition, this base-level server must be able to generate 'forward knowledge' for the information it contains. The second type of server collects the 'forward knowledge' generated by a number of base-level servers, and can take a query sent to it and determine which of the base-level servers it indexes might contain information relevant for the query. A single physical server may contain both primary information and 'forward knowledge' for a number of other servers, and an index server can also index 'forward knowledge' for a number of other index servers, allowing a hierarchical mesh of index servers to be built. For more details on the information provider's point of view, see the 'Documentation' section of this template.
The basic information model is centered on the concept of 'templates'. A template is a collection of attribute:value pairs, where the allowable attributes are specified by the template type. The whois++ templates are based on the templates defined by the IAFA working group of the IETF. The values associated with given attributes are not necessarily limited to text, they can be digitized sound clips, etc.
Depending on the client she uses, the user will see a connection to the local whois++ base-level server. The user can ask the server for a list of templates supported by that server, and can then call up a
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blank version of the template so that she can fill in values for the attributes she knows. Once she has filled in the template as much as she wants, she issues a query to the server to find all the entries which have these attribute:value pairs. If she is not satisfied with the responses, she can then start traversing the index service to locate a server which can adequately answer her query. In addition, if a user makes frequent use of the index service, she can set 'bookmarks' which can be used later to directly contact servers she's found useful in the past, without having to traverse the index service again.
Document Title: Architecture of the Whois++ Index Service Location details: Site: gopher.ucdavis.edu Full file name: /pub/IETF/WNILS/Architecture.Index.Service
Document Title: Architecture of the WHOIS++ Service Location details: Site: gopher.ucdavis.edu Full file name: /pub/IETF/WNILS/Architecture.Overview
Document Title: Specifications for WHOIS Services Location details: Site: gopher.ucdavis.edu Full file name: /pub/IETF/WNILS/Discussion.Paper
As this is a coming attraction, we encourage people to get in on the ground floor. The authors of this protocol see it as potentially being a key player in any integrated Internet information architecture, and we can always use more volunteers who want to beta-test code for us.
NIR Group Name: Internet Anonymous File Archive Working Group
Sponsoring Organisation: IETF
Working subgroups: none.
Description of main group:
This working group came to completion during the IETF meeting in November, 1992 and two Internet drafts are are now circulating. The archive for this mailing list is currently available on "archives.cc.mcgill.ca" via anonymous ftp in the file "pub/mailing-lists/iafa".
Sponsoring Organisation: Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) Architectures and Standards Program
Working subgroups: Name of subgroup: Mailinglist-Address:
Description of main group:
Program priorities are 1) to facilitate a consistent and complete mechanism for linking bibliographic, abstracting, and indexing files to files of their associated source materials; 2) a single standard for the transmission of bitmapped image files; 3) protocols for handing networked requests for delivery of source materials; 4) mechanisms for interorganizational authentication, accounting, and billing; and 5) to integrate lessons drawn from the experience of pilot projects that exercise networked printing utilities and 6) to provide an "interoperability workshop" to specify, implement, and test advanced functions of Z39.50 to accelerate the pace and to ensure the quality of standardization efforts in this area.
