From: daniel@nstn.ns.ca (Daniel MacKay)
Subject: Re: index for all of gopherspace
Organization: NSTN Network Operations Centre, Nova Scotia, Canada
Date: Tue, 28 Jul 1992 19:47:22 GMT

Hello!

Billy Barron writes: 
> This could be done.  Actually, I don't really care to make this a "user"
> feature.  It would involve some major coding and maybe a protocol change.
> Just something us sysadmins use to figure out where we would like to place
> links to.

I certainly _was_ thinking of it as a user feature, and no, in my
gedanken-design, it ran on existing gopher-ware.  The components:
 - a wordy description of the resource for which your gopher is 
   the authority, emailed to an administrator (hang on for an update 
   of this idea), complete with a .link file to the resource.
 - those descriptions dropped into a directory on the master Index server
   and indexed.
 - A search item on all gophers, that sent a query to the master server.
   The master server would return pointers to the descriptions of the
   resources, which you could browse.  (with a descriptor that possibly
   gave you "headline" info about the resource, or its physical/net
   location, if you care about such a thin).  When you had find the one 
   you want, you point-and-shoot at the accompanying resource menu item 
   itself.

Peter Deutsche writes:
> While talking about indexing Gopherspace, the next release of archie 
> will allow gathering of arbitrary collections of information and ...
> [...]
> and we plan to put
> in pointers to the various Gopher servers as a proof of concept.

I was describing my idea to a visitor to my office, and he suggested
exactly the same thing- there be a file with a well-known-name available on
every gopher that is authoritative for some resource.  This file would have
a wordy and search-rich description of the resources, i.e. an abstract for
the resource written in a way that it will be full of keywords that people
are likely to use when they're looking for it.  The one for the recipies
database would have words like "recipies" "food" "cooking" (but would it
contain an entry for "dessert" "entree"?  Hmm.)

Peter's, or someone's, robot could sweep through the gopher servers
periodically, collect the files, and build the Index Into Gopherspace.

My point: there are not *that* many things in gopherspace once you take
out all the redundancy.  If we only collect descriptions from people who
are authoritative for their resource, the problem dwindles into something
quite doable- think of how much smaller Peter's archie database would be if
there was only one entry in it for every ftp'able resource!

Anyway, it results in an entity that's like a couple of things:
 a) Peter's "whatis" project.
 b) My gopherizing of the SRI NISC List-of-Lists, available on the
    nstn.ns.ca gopher; check it out as 
	Internet Resources
	   Mail Lists
	      Mail List Subject Search

The important thing is that the *name* of something usually doesn't tell
you much about it.  So a robot indexing all the words of the menu items it
finds in gopherspace is relatively useless.  Someone carefully writing a
description of their resource, keeping in mind the kind of keywords a user
might use when looking for it, is *much* better.  Yeah, writing it is work.
But- garbage in, garbage out.  If you're authoritative for a resource,
presumably you should be able to take the time to describe the resource
once.

Peter continues:
> Now, the missing link here seems to be a simple way to get the index
> info out of Gopher.
I don't think that's much of a problem.  *The* thing that gopher's best at
is delivering documents.  And I think it's quite reasonable to have a
Well-Known-Directory containing descriptions of the data for which that
gopher is authoritative, (e.g. me and CA*Net news, Canadian Weather).

On a related topic- Peter, does that mean that the archie data and the
whatis data will be integrated?  I had a complaint from a user the other
day that my gopher/archie gateway didn't deliver whatis data, and I
thought- right!  Why doesn't it?
--
	Daniel MacKay				daniel@nstn.ns.ca
	NOC Manager, NSTN Operations Centre	902-494-NSTN
	Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada