Each attempts to improve the sharing and accessibility of global data. Each takes keywords and uses them to search distributed information databases. These provide a mapping between human understandable descriptions and location information. Thinking Machines Inc., November 1989. WAIS maintains a directory of databases, which is used to identify databases relevant to a user s query.
Clients cache previous queries and their results for future reference.
Wide area information server concepts . Experiments showed that the name and date extraction heuristic performed poorly, and the idea was discarded. In WAIS, entries are returned and are ranked based on the number of times the search words occur in each entry. Wide Area Information Server Concepts . Version 4, Draft.