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Título: World information tool : a geographical approach to resource discovery on the Internet
Autores: Stancu, Luminita
Fecha: 1994
Publicador: McGill University - MCGILL
Fuente:
Tipo: Electronic Thesis or Dissertation
Tema: Geography.
Information Science.
Computer Science.
Descripción: The Internet has been conceived as a communication tool to cross geographical boundaries and allow knowledge to be shared among people from all over the world. As a consequence of the expansion of computer networks, the abundance of available information and its variety make the process of resource discovery crucial for many people coming from different backgrounds, who often do not have computer skills.
Resource Discovery Services (RDSs) have been developed along with almost every kind of resource, in order to enable access to each specific information pool. Among these services, the most popular are Archie, WAIS, Gopher and WWW, each performing better certain functions rather than others, even though their functionality sometimes overlaps. Inexperienced users are seldom aware of the efficiency of a particular service given a certain task and even less willing to use different tools, each one with its own characteristics.
This work is concerned with the presentation of the most common RDSs, followed by the design and implementation of a system called World Information Tool (WIT), able to group existing RDSs and offer to the user the capability of exploiting them in a single, composite tool.
The approach considered by WIT involves only the client side of the RDSs model, without requiring any modifications of the existing servers and protocols. Moreover, the geographical display of the servers permits a better use of the network resources, by attempting to spread the workload among different servers and make users choose nearby servers. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)
Idioma: en