HARPER%FINFUN@ICNUCEVM.CNUCE.CNR.IT ("Robert Harper Finland", CSC) (06/25/91)
If you want to sell an idea who do you go to? To the big bosses who hold the purse strings, or the grass roots users who utilise the network. I think I prefer the latter. << Now we prepare the ground >> ( An introduction to WAIS ) Excepts from BYTE May 1991. "Browsing through terabytes" " WAIS is an engineering effort spearheaded by Thinking machines, the manufacture of the Connection Machine, a massively parrallel super computer." "The Libary of congress archives roughly 25 terabytes in its collection. To browse through this volume on your own would be nearly impossible" " WAIS can distill the contents of archives into neatly manageable and browsable folders" " With Relevance feedback WAIS can retreive documents with greater ease and speed " " The WAIS protocol also lets you use English-language-style query lexicon instead of cryptic SQL or forth generation languages" "The DowQUEST runs on Connection machine... has 1 gigabyte of text derived from over 400 sources... the search time with a hundred word query composed in typed english... is less than half a second." "The projections for the connection Machine system indicate that when it is scaled to a 1 terabyte database with a ten word query obtaining an answer within 10 sec or less is highly probable." Rob "I have seen the future and it is big" Harper