From: emv@msen.com (Edward Vielmetti)
Subject: Re: Information Services Etiquette (was Re: Gopher directories)
Keywords: knock down drag out fight
Organization: MSEN, Inc. -- Ann Arbor, MI
Date: Wed, 15 Apr 1992 04:24:47 GMT

In article <1992Apr15.011753.18942@sifon.cc.mcgill.ca> peterd@cc.mcgill.ca (Peter Deutsch) writes:
>
>What was called for was control over who gets into the Gopher
>service tree, and prevention of those who would operate outside of
>the Gopher service tree. Unless there is a mechanism for offering and 
>locating alternatives (and I proposed one) then this is to me a form of
>censorship on the free flow of information.

Er, it's easy to get into the Gopher "service tree" -- you just need
to get into someone else's gopher who's in the web, and you're in.
Since gophers are omnivorous you don't really know what all gateway
to what weird service is in there.  Much more heterogeneous than FTP.
You want to provide an alternative, that's dirt easy -- run your own
directory full of "all the world's gophers".

Besides, if you're in "gopherspace" that's only a subset of all of the
things that World Wide Web can get to, so you're reachable from there too.

>The problem I want to solve is that, short of scanning the entire
>Gopher tree, there is currently no mechanism for locating specific
>servers. I would address that with a generalized directory.

We've already run our course with "generalized directories"; they're,
well, too general.  And they don't scale except by more brute force.
Gopher is particularly good at building "specialized directories",
distributed information systems which are specific to a particular
domain of interest (eg the "biogophers") and cooperatively developed
by peers working together.  

>The current archie merely mirrors the information available at any
>particular site into a central repository or database. Users of archie 
>can come to our machine and expend our cycles searching for information 
>in this database. They don't need to know a priori where this 
>information came from, greatly easing the "Resource Discovery Problem" 
>from their point of view.

Peter, the "Resource Discovery Problem" is a non-problem.  We have
no problem finding resources out there on the net, by god there are
zillions of them of all shapes, sizes, colors, access speeds what have
you.  Some are good and some are nonsense.  Power tools like archie are
useful to help find things in the mess, but they shouldn't be confused
with a user interface.  The net is just too damn big to say "one search
on one resource pointers database does it all".  You *want* to know where
the information is coming from, since that's a good clue to whether
it's any good at all.

I'm taking Mike Schwartz's suggestion that what we have is a
"perspective discovery problem" as a starting point.  What you want
to do is locate people that have a good perspective on how to deal
with a particular problem or group of problems and figure out how to
view the world from their angle.  There's a book by Nahum Goldman (sp?)
which was announced to the "online@uunet.ca" list (search that WAIS
db for the exact result) that talks about "subject expert searching";
I haven't read it yet (anyone?) but it sounds like a similar approach.

One real problem which has yet to get a general solution is the
"funding discovery problem"; how to build a service which will generate
money from customers or grant agencies sufficient to give the originators
resources to do what they *really* want to do.  I know some people
are good at that particular game.  Better yet there's the "lunch
discovery problem" to figure out how to work it so that people pay your
way to conferences so you can have many fine lunches and dinners, that's
a nice trick....

--
Edward Vielmetti, vice president for research, MSEN Inc. emv@msen.com
      MSEN Inc., 628 Brooks, Ann Arbor MI  48103 +1 313 741 1120
MIME mail cheerfully accepted.  "We tried that, and it didn't matter."
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