[13] in DCNS Development
information retrieval
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jon A. Rochlis)
Thu May 2 16:41:46 1991
From: jon@MIT.EDU (Jon A. Rochlis)
Date: Thu, 2 May 91 16:39:50 -0400
To: developers@MIT.EDU
Several of our current applications as well as many of our potential
future applications are basically information retrieval apps.
For example Techinfo, OLH, MITDIR, card catalog information,
registrar's information. There is great interest in trying to come up
with common building blocks for IR applications, so as to leverage
development efforts. There are emgerging international standards for
client server based IR systems and there is publically available code
to play with.
I have created a public mailing list called "information-retrieval" (with an
alias of "ir") to discuss the issues involved with client server based
IR systems at MIT.
There is also a public list "z3950", which is a redist of
a list for z3950 implementors. z3950 is an ANSI IR protocol.
There is a list called "wais-interest-redist" which should receive a
redist of wais-interest@think.com (but I have yet to see a message).
Thinking machines has been working on a "wide area information
servers" system which uses Z39.50 and which has several interesting
sources of information (wall street journal, CIA world factbook,
hacker's dictionary, and many others). There is a Macintosh front end
program (anonymous ftp from think.com wais/WAIStation-0-62.sit.hxq),
and there are unix clients (command line and X based), indexing
programs, and Z39.50 servers. These can be found in
/afs/net/project/z3950. Mark Eichin has compiled the latest versions
for the VAX. Let me know if you're intested in working on this stuff.
-- Jon
