The main problem for many users of WWW today is that they cannot
locate the information they are searching for.
Solutions to these problems are meta-indices/libraries which
either manually or automatically collect (meta) information from
information (ftp, www, gopher, wais) sites around the world.
The problem is, these meta-libraries require much work to be kept
up-to-date (and so, they usually aren't very up-to-date at all)
and there are so many of them; resulting in most meta-libraries
keeping a list of other meta-libraries.
Where is this all going? More and more meta-libraries result in
more and more replication of work and also less quality of the
different meta-libraries. Today, it seems most sites have their
own (small and incomplete) meta-libraries, which should also be
unneccessary. Will there be a _the_ meta-library sometime in the
future which are mirrored perhaps in several places? Or some
other way to locate information?
What is the best solution in the meantime? (I've thought about
giving the GNA Meta-Library and the W3 library at CERN all the
information in our local 'meta-library' so that they at least
will be a superset of ours. Then, mirroring/caching the
browsable library-pages locally - the database/searchable index
part cannot be replicated very easily. If it is agreed upon here
that this sounds like a decent solution, then maybe we should
urge all webmasters around the world to do the same?)
Bye,
-- Bjoern Stabell (bjoerns@staff.cs.uit.no)