Organization: Bar-Ilan University Computing Center, Israel
Date: Thu, 1 Oct 1992 12:24:10 IST
From: Hank Nussbacher <HANK@BARILVM.BITNET>
Newsgroups: alt.gopher,comp.infosystems.gopher,comp.infosystems.wais
Subject: Comparison between Gopher, WAIS and WWW

I have been trying for the past few weeks to examine the benefits of
Gopher/WAIS/WWW and to see which would be the most appropriate to
use.  I would like to present my findings so that others may benefit.

Gopher is a menu driven system.  Each Gopher server has links to
other Gopher servers so that one can "seamlessly" bounce from one
server to another with no perceived change of environment.  Gopher's
down-side that I have determined is in finding the proper resource.
There now exists dozens of Gophers, each with dozens of sub-menus.
Somewhere buried in some Gopher server on the other side of the
world might be some very important resource that you have been
looking for.  Unfortunately, there is no easy way to know about that
resource unless you start a lengthy and time consuming Gopher tour.

WAIS is a method of searching indexed text.  Someone can come along
and take a hundred files on the topic of numerical analysis and
index them into one .SRC file.  New resources are announced in a
special indexed database called "directory-of-servers" which solves
the Gopher problem mentioned above.

WWW is hypertext.  It goes beyond Gopher which can display menus and
beyond WAIS by allowing pointers and chains within the text.
Hypertext links can lead you down a path that may be fruitful or it
may be a dead end.  Anyone who has used Hypertext on a multimedia
system knows the power that it affords the user.

So which is for you?

I view Gopher as the SMTP/SNMP of information retrieval.  I would
call Gopher - Simple Information Retrieval (SIR).  That is the
reason it is far more popular that WAIS and WWW combined.  But why
is that so? Let us take an example.  You are mandated to create an
information system for your university.  You would like to include,
among many things, local bus line timetables, restaurants in the
area, and apartment rentals.

We could set all the data into a WAIS index and the user could
search of the word "McDoogal Street" and find which buses run there,
which restaurants are there as well as apartments to be rented.  But
if the restaurant is located on a side street off of McDoogal Street
it will not come up in the search.  How is a student to know where
is a good place to live near the campus? What words would he/she use
to search with? Clearly WAIS is not the solution.

Lets try WWW.  We could create the following Hypertext: I could find
an apartment to rent on McDoogal and then click to see the closest
bus line and then click its time schedule and then click to see what
Chinese restaurants are nearby.  The possibilities are endless.  It
is super-cool.  But practical - no way.  No university would invest
the manpower to hypertext all this info (which takes enormous time
and needs to be constantly updated) and add in all the necessary
textual links.  When is Hypertext needed? Encyclopedias and
reference books are ideal to be hypertexted.  You do it once and you
don't have to update it the next semester.  You can even buy data that
has already been hypertexted - as long as there is enough of a
demand from a commercial source.  But to sit and hypertext the QX-1
bus line is an extreme waste of resources.

This is where Gopher comes in.  A user is given a menu with 3
submenus: Bus lines, restaurants, apartment rentals.  The user goes
to the document, brings it up, scans it, perhaps prints it to show
to a friend.  A secretary can be in charge of updating the file.  It
is a straight ASCII file with no special codes or pointers.  In
other words, it is easy to maintain and easy to retrieve.

The recent excellent Krol book "The Whole Internet Users Guide and
Catalog" comes out in favor of WWW over Gopher.  I suspect this is a
common trap us techo-dweebs fall into.  The more features, the more
powerful, the better the system has to be.  It is the same pitfall
people fell into 10 years ago when they ran out to buy a PC to
balance their checkbooks.

If you wish to set up a campus information system that is simple to
use, and simple to maintain, I suggest you look into Gopher.  If you
wish to support a certain campus faculty (like medicine or law) that
has many online documents that they wish to be able to search
easily, look into WAIS.  If you have reference books and extra
manpower available look into WWW.

Hope this helps.

Hank Nussbacher
Bar-Ilan University
Israel
hank@vm.biu.ac.il
Xref: sparky alt.gopher:1300 comp.infosystems.gopher:612 comp.infosystems.wais:526