Network information resources
Access to stuff you already know about
If you know of a WAIS source, or Gopher or FTP site which specializes in a
particular topic of interest, Mosaic can be used to access it. Follow
these links to simple (I hope!) fill-in forms:
- Anonymous FTP --- browse files on remote
FTP servers (indexed by Archie)
through an FTP session run by Mosaic.
- Gopher --- browse information on
Gopher servers (indexed by Veronica).
- Wais --- do full-text search on text or
multimedia databases using the WAIS protocol.
Access to stuff you don't know where to find
If you're looking for information on a particular topic, but you don't
already know of a site or server specializing in the topic, you need an
indexing service. There are two general types of these ---
indexes of information on a particular topic, with pointers to servers all
over the net, and broad-spectrum indexes to all information
available through a particular protocol or service.
The NCSA
Index of Indexes is an extensive list of both types of index
services. Some examples of particular interest to the lab:
These indices may be queried for information on a particular topic. Examples:
- Unified
Computer Science TR Index --- keyword retrieval on abstracts of CS
technical reports from numerous on-line archives, with pointers to the
on-line postscript.
- Yahoo is
an extended subject listing of Internet resources available
through several protocols (one of many, and one of the better
ones).
- EINet Galaxy
is another such index, this one automatically maintained.
Broad-spectrum indices
These attempt to cover a wider variety of the information available on the
Net. A few examples:
- Archie
supports search through the names of files available worldwide through
anonymous FTP.
- Veronica
supports search through the accumulated menu entries of most of the
world's Gopher servers.
- The CUI
Meta-index lists, and allows you to search, a number of
Archie-like databases of available Web-pages. (No such tool has
emerged as a standard yet). The WWW Worm
is particularly recommended.
- The WAIS directories of servers do
full-text search on abstracts of just about all generally accessible
WAIS servers.
________________________________________________________________
Robert Thau, rst@ai.mit.edu