Internet resource discovery services

An overview of resource discovery services currently available on the Internet is presented. The authors concentrate on the following discovery tools: the Wide Area Information Servers (WAIS) project, Archie, Prospero, Gopher. The World-Wide Web (WWW), Netfind, the X.500 directory, Indie, the Knowbot Information Service (KIS), Alex, Semantic File Systems, and Nomenclator. The authors summarize the surveyed tools by presenting a taxonomy of their characteristics and design decisions. They also describe where to find and how to access several of the surveyed discovery services. They conclude with a discussion of future directions in the area of resource discovery and retrieval.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">></ETX>