Subject: Re: Internet-gopher , WWW, WAIS, etc
From: timbl (Tim Berners-Lee)
To: Anders Gillner <[email-masked]>
Cc: NIR, www-talk
Date: Thu, 21 Nov 91 17:51:35 GMT+0100

Anders,

>> systems within systems within systems!

> [expletive deleted] mess !!. I have written to Joyce R. and said  
that we need some kind of structure and a worldwide cooperation about  
datastructure.

There two areas -- orgainzing the data structure itself, and  
coordinating addressing/protocols/formats. Both are in embryonic  
stages at the moment so a few concurrent ideas must be useful to the  
world. Both can also, to a certain extent, be resolved by a "survival  
of the fittest" principle (as Brewster argues in [1]): Those reviews,  
overviews and indexes which have the best coverage, signal to noise  
ratio and good links will be read most, and quoted most. It would  
save time, though, if all the projects pooled resources a bit more.  
Some unaligned funding would help of course...

 Various people (CC'd on this mail) are talking about putting  
together a mailing list about resolving technical issues. Personally,  
I don't mind where the list is -- it sounds like a good idea. The  
problem seems to be working out the overlap with lists such as  
www-talk, wais-talk, archie-people, the anon. ftp IETF WG., various  
public lists [2], etc etc.  Perhaps someobody could try to make a  
"state of the nation(?)" list of who's doing what now.

	Tim

__________________________________________________________
Tim Berners-Lee                       [email-masked]
World Wide Web project                (NeXTMail is ok)	
CERN                                  Tel: +41(22)767 3755
1211 Geneva 23, Switzerland           Fax: +41(22)767 7155

References:

[1]Brewster Kahle on WAIS concepts (much applies to other systems  
too)
 www file://quake.think.com//pub/wais/doc/wais-concepts.txt
[2] List of some lists involved in NIR:
www http://info.cern.ch:8001/wais.cic.net:210/lists network  
information retrieval