Chris.Holt@newcastle.ac.uk (Chris Holt) (02/28/90)
I would just like to observe that within universities, the traditional
hierarchical naming schemes are fractured (?) with cross-disciplinary
fields all over the place. We don't really want a tree-structured
hierarchy, but a directed graph; sort of an extended relational
database. Thus, to take a contentious example, one should be able
to access rec.aquaria by "fishies", "ichthyology", "biology.marine",
"soc.culture.snails", etc. etc.; even libraries allow access by
name, author, and subject(s).
So: given that we want (or should want) to plan for the
next generation of news access:
1. What should the user interface look like?
2. What would be the underlying distributed database?
Any thoughts?
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Chris Holt, Computing Lab., U. of Newcastle | Chris.Holt@newcastle.ac.uk
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"I will show you fear in a handful of bits..."