Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip
Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!qt.cs.utexas.edu!yale.edu!ox.com!msen.com!emv
From: emv@msen.com (Ed Vielmetti)
Subject: Re: copyright status and future development of comp.archives
In-Reply-To: schoff@PSI.COM's message of 26 Jun 91 19:48:28 GMT
Message-ID: <EMV.91Jun27145756@bronte.aa.ox.com>
Sender: usenet@ox.com (Usenet News Administrator)
Organization: MSEN, Inc. Ann Arbor MI
References: <56075900D99F401D02@vms.cis.pitt.edu> <9106261948.AA20843@psi.com>
Date: Thu, 27 Jun 1991 18:57:59 GMT

In article <9106261948.AA20843@psi.com> schoff@PSI.COM ("Martin Lee Schoffstall") writes:

   We have a tool which integrates
   X.500 and Anonmous FTP so that you can (today) explore the RFC hierarchy
   by author, title, etc, and then grab the document from various sites
   which hold the RFC's.  The tool is called x5ftp and will be released
   no later then the end of the project (31dec91).

   And we're extending the model to deal with other things than RFC's....

Well, I'd have to say that dealing with RFC's is about as easy as they
come, and you'd better have a damn fine project when you're done or
I'll be quite disappointed.  The texts are regular and structured,
there's a lot of boilerplate text which could be extracted out and
conclusions drawn from it, and there's a substantial amount of
"superstructure" in that RFCs reference other documents and there's a
strong sense of "this supersedes that, this modifies that, etc.".
It's a consistent, high quality, verified data stream, you should be
able to do a lot more with it than just browse author and title.

There is no "RFC Hierarchy"; the collection of RFCs is a complex,
tangled web of references, updates, improvements, discussions, and
ephemera.  Attempts to impose a strict hierarchical structure on it
will fail to capture the richness of information in it.  

Does your tool provide any way to search through the various sections
of the RFCs?  For instance, modern RFCs all have a "security
considerations" section; can you browse through those looking for RFCs
which have extensive discussion?  That would be valuable.

Does your tool provide any kind of similarity metrics or groupings
between the RFCs, so that (e.g.) RFC's 1064, 1176, and 1203 are
presented together (IMAP), with RFC 1223 not too far away (POP3) ?  A
tool with proper browsing support would facilitate this kind of exchange.

Several RFCs reference materials which are available for anonymous FTP
from other sites; does your browser have direct support for (e.g.) the
NOCTOOLS catalog?  A good system would let you point and click and get
the goods delivered back to your local machine.

A proper browser or filtering agent would have the ability to store
queries for later replay.  If I find an RFC that I like, can I store
the query that found so that the next time an RFC (or internet draft)
is issued that's similar to it I will be notified?

An RFC tool would be a useful thing, but I don't have high hopes for
x5ftp, to the extent that X.500 is a gubbishy protocol for these kind
of searches and that you're constrained to use that technology.

   ... we decided to issue the equivalent
   of a position paper which is titled "Towards Networked Information
   Retrieval"...

Full citation below.  A reasonably good paper, albeit wordy,
illustrating the defects in both X.500 and Z39.50 for information
retrieval; neither process seems adequate to handle the problem at
hand, though you could argue that any work in this area is progress
and should be supported.  Notably missing from the paper is a mention
of Brewster Kahle's WAIS project (see below), which is an
implementation of Z39.50 that addresses some of the defects mentioned.

Edward Vielmetti, vice president for research, MSEN Inc. emv@msen.com

"(6) The Plan shall identify how agencies and departments can
collaborate to ... expand efforts to improve, document, and evaluate
unclassified public-domain software developed by federally-funded
researchers and other software, including federally-funded educational
and training software; "
			"High-Performance Computing Act of 1991, S. 272"

-- MSEN Archive Service file verification
uu.psi.com
-r--r--r--  1 dsadmin  staff       50666 Jun 25 18:27 /wp/nir.ms
-r--r--r--  1 dsadmin  staff       56973 Jun 27 11:16 /wp/nir.txt
-r--r--r--  1 dsadmin  guest      117611 Jun 25 18:27 /wp/ps/nir.ps
found psi-networked-information-retrieval ok
uu.psi.com:/wp/{nir*,ps/nir*}

-- MSEN Archive Service file verification
quake.think.com
total 5561
drwxrwxrwx  2 14           1024 Jun 25 00:07 wais-discussion
-rw-rw-rw-  1 1637       635857 Jun 21 21:50 WAIStation-Canned-Demo.sit.hqx
-r--r--r--  1 14         463981 Jun 13 20:44 wais-8-b1.tar.Z
-rw-rw-r--  1 1556       475161 May 21 18:43 wais-8-a12-3.tar.Z
-rw-rw-rw-  1 1637       635225 May 16 03:01 WAIStation-0-62.sit.hqx
-rw-rw-rw-  1 999        321268 May 13 20:48 wais-ir12.ZU
-rw-rw-rw-  1 14         409388 Apr  5 00:44 wais-8-a11.tar.Z
-rw-rw-rw-  1 1637      1094536 Mar 28 00:37 WAIStation-0-62-Sources.sit.hqx
-rw-rw-rw-  1 14        1070714 Mar 23 01:24 WAIStation-0-61.sit.hqx
-rw-rw-rw-  1 14         475815 Mar 23 01:19 wais-8-a10.tar.Z
found wais ok
quake.think.com:/pub/wais/
