Re: Forms support in clients

Fisher Mark (FisherM@is3.indy.tce.com)
Thu, 29 Sep 94 07:53:00 PDT

>This is where the current model breaks down since it is essentially
>driven by client requests. I'd like to be able for my viewer to put a
>"watcher" into a server. Some mechanism, not yet existing, would have
>to be invented to let the watcher tell my viewer that something new
>and interesting (as defined by my script) is out there. Then my
>viewer could have the new document fetched, my coffee brewed, and my
>slippers handy when I got up in the morning.

This idea apparently has floated around the Information Retrieval community
for a while under the rubric of "Selective Dissemination of Information".
One paper on SDI that has (IMHO) a pretty decent bibliography is "Index
Structures for Selective Dissemination of Information Under the Boolean
Model", by Tak W. Yan and Hector Garcia-Molina, ACM Transactions on
Database Systems, Vol. 19, No. 2, June 1994. From that paper, it seems that
implementations have usually been by some hard-coded mechanism instead of
the general-purpose "upload a script" proposed here. For SDI, TCL
extensions for searches would seem appropriate.

I'd sure like to see someone implement this -- SDI is on my to-do list if I
don't soon see code somewhere else.
======================================================================
Mark Fisher Thomson Consumer Electronics
fisherm@indy.tce.com Indianapolis, IN

"Just as you should not underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon
traveling 65 mph filled with 8mm tapes, you should not overestimate
the bandwidth of FTP by mail."