Internet Info 1997 December/Internet_Info_CD-ROM_Walnut_Creek_December_1997.iso/isoc/pub/isoc_news/1-2/n-1-2-040.31.3a.Z/n-1-2-040.31.3a

Text File | 1994-03-26 | 3KB | 64 lines

040.31.3a  Exploring Internet Gopherspace
by Mark P. McCahill <[e-mail]>

Internet Gopher is a simple protocol for building distributed information
systems and organizing access to Internet resources. The design goal for Gopher
is to make navigating the Internet and accessing distributed resources easy for
naive and non-technical users.

The Internet Gopher client software presents users with a virtual information
matrix (gopherspace) that they can navigate by either browsing a hierarchical
arrangement of items, or search by submitting queries to full-text search
engines. For browsing in gopherspace, the gopher client software presents the
user with lists of items from which the user selects an items of interest
(typically by pointing and clicking with a mouse). For instance, at the
University of Minnesota, a user might look for a salmon recipe by looking in
the
"fun & games" directory for the "recipes" directory which contains a "seafood"
directory. Alternatively, the user can select an item called "Search lots of
places at the University of Minnesota" to look for salmon; when this search
engine is selected the user is prompted for what words to search for (salmon)
and a full-text search is done by the server. The result of the search is a
list
of items that matched the search criteria.

Although the Gopher protocol architecture supports distributed servers, access
is transparent to the user. A gopher client is configured with the address of a
single Gopher server. When the client is launched it contacts this server for
an
initial list of items to display to the user. Each item has a type associated
with it so that the client software can differentiate between documents,
directories, search engines, sounds, etc. The type descriptor also makes it
easy
to add functionality to the gopher protocol by defining new types. Each item
also has a name (to be displayed to the user), a selector string (be sent to a
server to get the contents of the item), and the port and domain name of the
machine on which the item resides. Note that the machine name and port can
easily be used to refer to other gopher servers; this makes it easy to
construct
links (pointers) to item that reside on other servers. Links to items that
reside on other machines can be refer to individual documents, search engines,
or directories (collections of items).

Because there are gateways from gopher to other services, gopher clients can
access information in WAIS, Archie, ftp, and USENET news. The gopher gateway to
Archie translates ftp sites listed by Archie into items that a gopher client
can
access directly through the gopher to ftp gateway; this makes finding and
fetching items via anonymous ftp seamless with a gopher client.

The Internet Gopher software (clients: Macintosh, PC, NeXT, X-windows, VMS,
VM/CMS, and Unix vt-100 terminal) (servers: Unix, NeXT, Macintosh, VMS, VM/CMS,
and MVS) is available for anonymous ftp from boombox.micro.umn.edu in the
/pub/gopher directory. Gopher is discussed on the gopher-news mailing list
(send
subscription requests to [e-mail]) as well as
on the USENET newsgroup alt.gopher. For a quick look at gopherspace, you can
telnet to consultant.micro.umn.edu and log in as "gopher"; for extended visits
to gopherspace you will probably want to run a gopher client on your own
machine.


* Mark P. McCahill, gopherspace engineer, Computer and Information System
University of Minnesota