>> systems within systems within systems!
> [expletive deleted] mess !!. I have written to Joyce R. and said
that we need some kind of structure and a worldwide cooperation about
datastructure.
There two areas -- orgainzing the data structure itself, and
coordinating addressing/protocols/formats. Both are in embryonic
stages at the moment so a few concurrent ideas must be useful to the
world. Both can also, to a certain extent, be resolved by a "survival
of the fittest" principle (as Brewster argues in [1]): Those reviews,
overviews and indexes which have the best coverage, signal to noise
ratio and good links will be read most, and quoted most. It would
save time, though, if all the projects pooled resources a bit more.
Some unaligned funding would help of course...
Various people (CC'd on this mail) are talking about putting
together a mailing list about resolving technical issues. Personally,
I don't mind where the list is -- it sounds like a good idea. The
problem seems to be working out the overlap with lists such as
www-talk, wais-talk, archie-people, the anon. ftp IETF WG., various
public lists [2], etc etc. Perhaps someobody could try to make a
"state of the nation(?)" list of who's doing what now.
Tim
__________________________________________________________
Tim Berners-Lee timbl@info.cern.ch
World Wide Web project (NeXTMail is ok)
CERN Tel: +41(22)767 3755
1211 Geneva 23, Switzerland Fax: +41(22)767 7155
References:
[1]Brewster Kahle on WAIS concepts (much applies to other systems
too)
www file://quake.think.com//pub/wais/doc/wais-concepts.txt
[2] List of some lists involved in NIR:
www http://info.cern.ch:8001/wais.cic.net:210/lists network
information retrieval