INTERNET RESOURCE DISCOVERY SERVICES

This article presents an overview of resource discovery services curre ntly available on the Internet. The authors concentrate on the followi ng discovery tools: the Wide Area Information Servers (WAIS) project, Archie, Pros pero, Gopher, the World-Wide Web (WWW), Netfind, the X.50 0 directory Indie, the Knowbot Information Service (KIS), Alex, Semant ic File Systems, and Nomenclator. These resource discovery tools speci alize in browsing, searching, and organizing information distributed t hroughout the Internet. Browsing tools let users navigate the informat ion space and find the specific data they need. Indexing search tools automatically locate relevant data on the basis of user interest. Inde pendent of the approach used, resource discovery services can also hel p users organize newfound information so that they can refer to it wit hout having to repeat the entire discovery process. The authors summar ize the surveyed tools by presenting a taxonomy of their characteristi cs and design decisions. They also describe where to find and how to a ccess several of the surveyed discovery services. They conclude with a discussion of future directions in the area of resource discovery and retrieval.