INTERNET RESOURCE DISCOVERY SERVICES

This article presents an overview of resource discovery services currently available on the Internet. The authors concentrate on the following discovery tools: the Wide Area Information Servers (WAIS) project, Archie, Pros pero, Gopher, the World-Wide Web (WWW), Netfind, the X.500 directory Indie, the Knowbot Information Service (KIS), Alex, Semantic File Systems, and Nomenclator. These resource discovery tools specialize in browsing, searching, and organizing information distributed throughout the Internet. Browsing tools let users navigate the information space and find the specific data they need. Indexing search tools automatically locate relevant data on the basis of user interest. Independent of the approach used, resource discovery services can also help users organize newfound information so that they can refer to it without having to repeat the entire discovery process. The authors summarize the surveyed tools by presenting a taxonomy of their characteristics and design decisions. They also describe where to find and how to access several of the surveyed discovery services. They conclude with a discussion of future directions in the area of resource discovery and retrieval.