If this turns out to be more complicated, people will scream a lot, and then, if they are told they have no choice, they simply won't use it. There are also key questions about which architectural approaches will win out in the marketplace. Weider, for example, admits that Bunyip's approach overlaps with the Harvest approach, which is already being deployed on the Internet. Harvest, h e says, also has tools to make it easier to pull information out of files automatically to create an index. But Weider's feeling is that humans will have to become involved in indexing at some point because the kind of tools needed to truly do that job well would require a semantic understanding close to human intelligence.
Brokers can communicate with other brokers, and gatherers can communicate with many brokers.
Harvest gatherers can run at a content provider's site or can support native FTP, Gopher or HTTP protocols across the network. The technology includes its own search engine as well as hooks to WAIS and Verity search engines. May. Harvest is also intended to be flexible enough to work with a variety of metadata types, although it is now limited to a keyword indexing, rather than a cataloging role. Today, the Harvest software is offered free to users and licensed to vendors building products with it. Users will pay for whoever does the best job of organizing these sectors.