wb8foz@mthvax.cs.miami.edu (David Lesher) (06/30/91)
I've been looking at the Thinking Machine Corp. offering called the
Wide Area Information Server. Here's how it would work:
If you have WAIS software installed on your system, you query the
telecom database to search through the archive. For example, a query
with the words "call waiting modem" returns documents with a score (is
it a perfect match, or close??) and the article identifiers. The best
part is still to come. You then request the article, and WAIS fetches
it for you to see/save!
Having once ftp'ed a year's worth of c.d.t. to local storage (good
thing my sysadm was off that day - that's a LOT of storage!!) and
grepped throught the lot looking for something; all I can say is this
sounds great!
Now I'm not sure how it could work on compresssed files, or even if
our archive sponsor would be willing to let the server run on its
machine. If they did, it would still likely need a lot of time just
to set it up. But I hope someone will look into this.
If you don't have WAIS and are interested in it, the most recent
version of the software is accessible via anonymous ftp to think.com,
in /Wais/wais-8-b1.tar.Z. There is also a Mac client in
/Wais/wais.sit.hqx, and some other files in the /Wais directory
explaining the WAIS project.
wb8foz@mthvax.cs.miami.edu (305) 255-RTFM
[Moderator's Note: The Telecom Archives has long been an area in great
need of improvement and streamlining. I just don't have the time, and
resources available to me, nor have I found anyone willing to take
over the task and give it the several hours of work needed for the
initial organization followed by the couple hours per week needed for
updating and maintainence thereafter. We need an index to the
articles within the various volumes/issues over the years, as well as
an index of authors, etc. We need a convenient way to pull single
issues (based on the results of an index search) rather than large
blocks of issues. The software you describe would no doubt be very
helpful. But I can't do these projects alone. PAT]